NEWS FROM THE VINEYARD - THE HARVEST CHEZ ROULOT....

September 7, 2022
Raj Vaidya

As I described last week, I was honored with the opportunity to visit and help with the beginning of harvest in Meursault at Domaine Roulot two weeks ago. It was a life changing experience, and I learned so much in such a short time that I am sure it will take me a year to truly digest all the information. But I thought I’d share a few observations here this week to give you all a sense of what the experience is like.

The first thing that struck me is how big the team of pickers has to be. We started out the first day with thirty pickers and increased that number to nearly forty within a couple of days. Jean-Marc’s nieces and nephews all were in attendance, and his youngest son was strictly instructed to be on time the next day after showing up a bit tardy the first. No special treatment for the son of the boss! The whole picking team at Roulot was fed a casse-croûte, or light late breakfast in the vineyard, along with breakfast and lunch over several courses served every day. Despite the immense amount of work, I could see that the pickers were genuinely having a great time, and it didn’t hurt that they always had some delicious bottles of wine on the table at lunch…

Back in the cellar the work starts at 6:30am, with a quick breakfast followed by set up for the day. Pumps and hoses are assembled to connect the pressoir to the tanks which are used to settle the juice before barreling down to the cellar. After the first day, we also had to decant those tanks full of juice harvested the previous day off the large sediment (called the bourbe) to prepare the blends of juice before barreling. At Roulot, Jean-Marc is quite hands on with this process, making sure that he tastes the juice and decides exactly how much to decant, and what to remove as bourbe. The bourbe is then added to a small amount of juice from the end of the press cycle which has been left unprotected overnight to oxidize completely. Jean-Marc has learned that in that last press there is to be found all of the compounds and proteins which have the highest inclination to oxidize early. As a protection against premature oxidation, this oxidized juice is combined with the bourbe and filtered to remove those now oxidized compounds, then added back to the clear juice that had been decanted prior to going to barrel. Jean-Marc has been utilizing this technique for some years now, and the results are super promising (albeit a lot of work!)

The juice is then blended in one large tank and barreled down to the cellar. Jean-Marc uses traditional 228L barrels but also a variety of larger format vessels for his larger holdings, the Clos des Bouchères, Clos de la Baronne (a village appellation vineyard which is blended into his ‘straight’ Meursault) and Tessons.

Stockinger, a well regarded Austrian barrel maker, is common in the cellar - usually these are 1000L barrels. Additionally, Jean-Marc has been experimenting more and more with glass carboys (called the ‘Wine Globe’, this is hermetic glass in a globe shape the same size as the traditional 228L barrel) and in porcelain amphoras of various sizes. It’s pretty cool that even though he’s been making these wines for forty years he’s still experimenting and tweaking all the time.

The harvest kicked off at Domaine Roulot in a Bourgogne Blanc vineyard named Malpoirières. The team of pickers gets started around 7am every day.

The team starts the day early, around 6:30am in the winery, and during harvest 15-17h days are not unusual.

The juice flowing from the press before heading to the tank for debourbage. Lots of bees and yellow jackets show up to enjoy a sweet drink in the afternoon sun!

The bourbe, or solid matter, left after the decanting. This is filtered along with the last pressed juice and added back to the must before going to barrel.

Jean-Marc watching the last bit of debourbage, or decanting of the clear juice to select how much solid matter to allow to make it into the barrel. These solids offer protection for the juice and must as fermentation begins.