Exhibiting notes of sweet berries and cherries mingled with notions of rose petals, musk, blood orange and spices, the 2021 Musigny Vieilles Vignes Grand Cru is medium to full-bodied, satiny and perfumed, with excellent concentration, lively acid and sweet, supple tannins. Impressively sensual and effortless, it represents a very strong start for Jean Lupatelli, the estate's new régisseur.
With the 2021 vintage, Jean Lupatelli took the reins at Comte de Vogüé, which was the occasion to revisit this historic estate after a few years' hiatus. Under the previous direction, which began with the 1986 vintage, the de Vogüé wines could often be chunky and unyielding. They were a critics' nightmare, as they frequently showed very well from barrel and just after bottling, only to shut down, seemingly permanently, seldom living up to one's expectations. According to old-timers, this wasn't the case with the wines made by Alain Roumier at Domaine de Vogüé up until 1985, or by his father Georges Roumier, and one of Burgundy's leading luminaries talks glowingly of drinking a case of the 1969 Musigny on release in the early 1970s; so, it seems as if the problems lay in the cellar. In any case, we can certainly all agree that the terroir wasn't among them.
Lupatelli seems set on revitalizing this estate, and I confess that I left impressed. He's looking at every detail of the process and spoke very candidly about it. The management of harvest itself seems to be a critical step, and in 2021 he abandoned the use of large gondolas to transport the grapes from the vineyard to the winery, replacing them with small cases. There's not a new sorting table, but the domaine's must pump has been banished in favor of filling tanks by gravity. All this means that the fruit is being handled much more gently. Cooperage choices are being refined, a new racking tank has been acquired to permit proper blending before bottling, and details of the bottling process itself are being revised. In the vineyards, replanting had largely stalled for the last 40 years, so that's now being undertaken. Of course, the 2021 vintage was a challenging year to start, but Lupatelli has already succeeded in producing some of the most perfumed, sensual, liberated young wines I've ever tasted at this address, so he appears to have hit the ground running. Can we look forward to a de Vogüé renaissance? I certainly hope so, and this first set of wines leads me to suppose that this isn't merely wishful thinking.
