Nathalie Richez - Santenay Rouge 1er Cru “Beauregard” 2021 (750ml)
Price: $89.99
| Producer | Nathalie Richez |
| Country | France |
| Region | Burgundy |
| Varietal | Pinot Noir |
| Vintage | 2021 |
| Sku | 201924 |
| Size | 750ml |
 |
Nathalie Richez Description
Nathalie’s home is the little town of Chagny, on the border of the Côte de Beaune and the Côte Chalonnaise; she vinifies her wines in a spartan room adjacent to her house, in steel and fiberglass tanks, and her barrel cellar is a couple of gravel-floored chambers beneath an old stone shed in the backyard. Except for the Aligoté for the Bouzeron, all her wines, from humblest to grandest, pass 18 months in 20% new oak—low-toast barrels from a tiny local one-man operation. She destems everything fully, allows fermentations to proceed spontaneously, and only applies sulfur after malolactic is complete—an utterly nonradical regimen that well serves her wines’ sense of classicism. She works without chemical herbicides in the vineyards and regularly aerates the soil, but she chooses not to adapt a “practicing organic” label, as she wants to retain the flexibility to employ her best judgment in every situation.
Nathalie’s vineyards encompass holdings in both the southern reaches of the Côte de Beaune (Santenay and Maranges) and the northern portions of the Côte Chalonnaise (Bouzeron and Mercurey), and of her 12 hectares she only currently bottles three and a half hectares’ worth, selling the remainder of her fruit to Drouhin and Jadot. We hope to work together to help her shift that balance over time, as we have done numerous times over our decades of work in the region. Like Nathalie herself, her wines are friendly, frank, unassuming, and immediately likable—Burgundies that may not reflect a deep family history of winemaking, but are as irresistibly pure as they come.
The premier cru Beauregard sits mid-slope in the northeast part of Santenay near the border of Chassagne-Montrachet, and Nathalie owns 0.3 hectares of Pinot Noir here. If her village-level Santenay is a case study in pure Burgundian Pinot Noir, Beauregard is—as one would expect—more particular in its personality: darker and more somber in its fruit (yet still fresh), with a more succulent texture and a tinge of smoke. This parcel typically yields just four barrels of wine.
| Quantity: |
