Harvest Report from the Château de Chambolle-Musigny

September 19, 2023

Raj Vaidya

I returned to NY Saturday after having spent a week working with the harvest and vinification team at Domaine Jacques-Frédéric Mugnier in Chambolle-Musigny. I returned with my fingernails black from all the grapes I processed, my shoulders and back muscles pained from all the heavy lifting, yet smiling from ear to ear with amazing memories of the experience and the satisfaction that comes from a hard week of physical labor. And also thanks to several delicious bottles shared over the course of the week! More on those in the next newsletter…

This harvest has proven to be a challenging one; white grapes were badly affected by oidium, and reds will suffer a bit from the high yield and the sunburn effects on the clusters facing south, caused by a huge heat spike towards the end of the season. Add to this the challenge of managing acetic bacteria which showed up in the clusters in the days around harvest, requiring a careful trie, or sorting, to remove affected grapes. Frédéric said to me at one point, “I’d almost rather have had another hale vintage…”.

But despite the challenges, there is some silver lining in that there was a huge crop. I worked 6 full workdays at the domaine, and for 5 of them we kept receiving grapes from the Clos de la Marèchale, and I learned exactly how giant that vineyard is (9.55 Hectares!) There was a respite from the Clos when the team picked Musigny and Les Amoureuses on Tuesday. Overall there will be lots of wine, and the quality of the grapes that made it through the destemming process into the vats was quite lovely.

Clos de la Marechale grapes arriving at the destemmer in small (but heavy) cases.

Frédéric trying to calculate the yield as the team places clusters on the destemmer and sorts for any compromised grapes.

At Mugnier, the grapes arrive in small cases weighing around 50lbs on average, 50 at a time. We would pick them up one case at a time and slowly pour out the grapes onto a vibrating table which dropped any tiny dried berries and a huge population of spiders, ladybugs and beetles through a sieve. The clusters then fall down into the destemming machine which further filters out affected berries and removes the remaining berries from the stems. The destemmed berries and free-run juice then get hoisted up via a forklift and poured into the vats to begin fermentation.

The destemmer hard at work.

Frédéric likes to say, “we don’t really do very much, just remove the stems and pour the grapes into the fermenting tanks…” but in reality , there is some sorting done at the vibrating table. Once the grapes have been in the vat overnight, the free run juice from the bottom of the tank is pumped into another tank to cool the juice to a low temperature, then the juice is returned to the tank with the berries. Grapes take forever to cool down, so it proves more efficient to cool the juice and then return it to the original vat. Several ferments started quite quickly, the Bonnes Mares (which was picked the day before I arrived) and the first 4 vats of the Clos were raging by the time I left Friday, and both Musigny and Amoureuses had begun robustly as well.

Filling the fermenting tanks with destemmed grapes from Musigny.

Even before fermentations begin, the wines go through one or two pump overs per day, where the juice from the bottom of the vat is pumped up and over the cap of floating grapes and skins on top. This keeps the cap wet, and manages the fruit flies who are trying to get to the delicious juice and grapes bringing along with them the threat of more acetic bacteria (the danger being that the bacteria could start moving the must in the direction of vinegar.) Once fermentation has started, these concerns diminish as the yeasts are so active that the acetic bacteria get overwhelmed, and the pump overs are less important.

Pumping over Les Amoureuses.

The reds will be pressed once fermentation has concluded, usually within two weeks or so. Then the wines will descend into the cellar to begin their slow aging in the cool, humid cellar.

Frédéric is a vigneron who often seems a bit pessimistic about his own wines; he is surely his harshest critic. But despite noting how the harvest left him nervous and unsteady, he was quick to remind me that many of the vintages he loves to drink today were fairly worrisome, even dire on occasion at the time of harvest. So he is (in his own way) keeping his outlook for 2023 relatively positive…