Château de Marsannay

Since 2012 Château de Marsannay has been owned by the Halley family, at the same time they bought the Château de Meursault. They own 34 hectares of superbly situated vines, and as with Château de Meursault, have invested heavily in realising the estate’s huge potential. The Domaine is managed by Château de Meursault’s Stephane Follin-Arbelet, who is overseeing a quality revolution, but Château de Marsannay have their own winemaking team, lead by the fantastic, and award-winning, Sylvain Pabion. Winemaking is classic and adaptive, largely de-stalked but with whole bunches when necessary, a cold-soaked prior to fermentation and then ageing in a mixture of new and used oak barriques for over a year. Alongside Château de Meursault, this is on course to become one of the largest organic certified estates in the Côte d'Or.

2017 Vintage

“At last a normal-sized harvest!” Were Sylvain Pabion’s heartfelt and fully justified words after the drought of 2015 and frost of 2016 lead to significantly reduced yields. It was tense at one point, there was a cold snap in Spring that saw temperatures plummet to zero degrees, but luckily they avoided frost completely. Heat arrived in May meaning an early and successful flowering. This heat continued throughout summer. By the end of August Sylvain noted that some parcels in the better-drained vineyards were starting to show signs of stress and were in danger of shutting down. A bout of rain at the very end of the month prevented this, luckily, and refreshed the vines. September continued with warm days and fresh nights. Ideal conditions. Harvest was relatively early, starting on the 5th September and finishing on the 12th. To have such great quality as well as quantity clearly delights Sylvain. The wines show good colours, intense perfume, an abundance of ripe fruit and supple, silky structures. Polished characterful Burgundies that will knock you off your feet! Another step up in quality here. This Chateau’s star continues to rise.

2018 Vintage

A warm vintage which played into Marsannay’s hands, being further north and generally cooler. Winemaker Sylvain Pabion terms 2018 “a remarkable year” for their Pinots which offer “a rare intensity of flavour on the palate.” Picking started here on the 4th September and, thanks to a team of 55 harvesters, lasted only 12 days – ensuring they picked grapes exactly when they wanted to, at optimum freshness and ripeness. The berries were fully ripe, and extractions happened readily. For this reason, Sylvain made sure the process was more of an “infusion” without resorting to pigéage. The juice was so naturally powerful and rich in tannins that Sylvain held back a little on whole-bunch fermentation this year, employing just a third for most cuvées except for the Grands Crus where he used just 7 to 8% as “seasoning”. Being small cuvées he did not want the bunch factor dominating too much. These are as velvety as they are rich in tannins and fruit. Powerful but voluptuous and they have kept their identities and freshness of flavour, too. This is without doubt a rare, highly impressive but concentrated vintage that will require long ageing in bottle.

2019 Vintage

Manager Stéphane Follin-Arbelet is thrilled with the 2019s at Château de Marsannay.“We have a freshness in the wines and there is a lot of fruit.They are not as powerful as 2018s, they are between 2018 and 2017 in style.” Picking began on the 11th September and lasted ten days.This being a dry vintage, they decided to employ a little bit of whole bunch fermentation, as stems were very ripe and healthy. This helped give freshness to the wines as well as being useful in managing extractions and fermentations, in what was a very small crop (roughly half the quantity of last year). Alcohol degrees are between 13.5 and 14, just below 2018 but above 2017. Ageing will broadly be the same as usual, in barrels for 12–16 months for all except the Grands Crus which get 18 months.This is a sensational range from Chåteau de Marsannay. From Bourgogne to Chambertin there is a real touch of class to the wines’ polished textures and fresh, precise ripe fruit flavours. Chapeau!

2020 Vintage

Sylvain Pabion is making the wine of his life and keeps raising the bar at Chateau de Marsannay.These rate as the finest wines they have made. Not only is Marsannay “fresh, concentrated and suited for global warming”, in Sylvain’s words, but he and Stephane Follin-Arbelet have been putting an immense amount of work into fine-tuning every aspect of production: from organic farming and cover crops, to high precision picking dates, gentle low sulphur winemaking and whole bunch fermentation adapted to vintage and terroir. As one 2020 TBC 2028 of the northern-most outposts in the Côte d’Or, harvest was a little later here than elsewhere – between 1st and 10th September. Grapes were healthy, concentrated and ripe, as were the stalks, so Sylvain has employed various degrees of whole bunch fermentations here (except for the cool, young vines Belair vineyard which was destemmed) ranging from 10%–50% depending on the cuvee in order to bring “aromatic range, freshness and tannins” to the wines.These are radiant, nuance and refined – the best we have ever tasted from the Côte’s most prominent rising stars.

2021 Vintage

The affable, well-informed Sylvain Pabion was clearly relieved to have this vintage in bottle after the challenges of the season. He’s rapidly becoming something of a master of Marsannay; a gifted exponent of the myriad terroirs and expositions this northern Cote de Nuits outpost contains. He was not alone in describing a very careful vinification for these ‘21s. “We had to wait a long time to get tannins and colour, vinifications were two to three weeks longer than usual. We didn’t punch down much, just at the start and we were very careful to extract just the right potential. And we tasted, tasted tasted. During the fermentations we thought we might be disappointed, but after malolactic fermentation we saw the quality of aromas coming back. The result is a vintage that is very different from previous years. These wines are very fresh, not deeply coloured, with expressive aromatics. The rain and disease pressuring during the season forced us to sort rigorously come harvest. The results are wines that are noble, fresh and intense, without huge tannins but with lots of aromatics.” Sylvain’s skill sings through in this wonderful range of wines – we found a new level of precision and detail in so many of them, and a translucency through which the various terroirs shine bright.

2022 Vintage

When Sylvain and Stéphane agreed to an 08.30 AM tasting on a Monday morning in October, none of us knew that France would be playing South Africa in the Rugby World Cup the night before. It had been a nail-biting, crushingly close quarter final that finished close to 11pm. We weren’t sure what to expect. A somber mood, a sense of injustice? Not a jot of it. Ever the professionals it was all smiles and warm greetings, samples at the ready. Perhaps it would have been different had they been celebrating a narrow victory? Or perhaps they just knew what a stellar range of wines they had in 2022. It was our very first tasting of the week and it set the tone perfectly. Sylvain explained that the June and July rains proved hugely beneficial for their Marsannay vineyards, providing the vines with enough water to coast through the warm, dry conditions that dominated the end of the season. “The wines are so aromatic.” Sylvain beamed. “They have tannins but they are soft and pliant, they have an easy freshness, and the alcohols didn’t get too high – the wines as a result feel juicy, with fruit, spice and savoury notes.” For our part, I’m not sure we’ve ever tasted such stylish wines at this address: flowing, luminous, site-specific single vineyard Marsannays alongside a quiver of delicious and highly impressive Côte de Nuits 1er and Grand Cru vineyards.