CHÂTEAU DE RULLY
RULLY PREMIER CRU
MOLESME 2018
Grape variety
Tasting notes
Nose: fruity notes of pear and fresh honey.
Palate: a rich and racy wine with white fruits aromas (pear again) and a long, elegant persistence in the mouth.
Wine and food pairing
Serving temperature
Ageing potential
History
Rully is a communal appellation made up of 23 Premiers Crus climats. White Rullys spread on a 261 ha area - including 68 ha of Premiers Crus - whereas red Rullys are produced on a 116 ha area of which 28 are Premiers Crus.
Rully was named after a rich roman, Rubilius, who built a villa and founded the village during the roman occupation. It was at first named Rubiliacum and it evolved through the years to become the current Rully.
Vinification and maturing
The Chardonnay grapes were hand harvested, carefuly sorted and put into 16kg boxes, to avoid bruising or crushing.
Once at the winery, the grapes went in a bladder press where they were squeezed from the inside to get the best quality of juice with a minimal exposure
to oxygen. Then, the must was left to settle for 16 to 24 hours to clarify before starting fermentation.
Vinification took place in thermo-regulated stainless steel tanks to ensure precision temperature controls and homogeneity of the cuvée.
Once the alcoholic fermentation was achieved, the wine was placed for an 9-month ageing period in 228 liters oak barrels (including 25% new oak barrels) on thin lees. Stirring was occasional (twice a month) until the beginning of the malolactic fermentation to prevent the wine from oxydating and help developping the complexity.
Vintage : 2018
It is quite hardly to sum up the vintage 2018 in a few words! Winter, grey and humid was followed by a capricious spring, subject to frosts and alternating times of sunshine and storms on an almost daily basis from May to the mid-June, making this period particularly stressful for our people in the vineyards.
Then came an incredible time of nice weather, hot, very hot and even heatwave periods until the end of… October!
Another particular vintage which looks like no other! As rainfalls episodes were particularly localized, we had to deal with very different degree of ripeness from a plot to another, depending of the water volume received by each vineyard.
In 2018, as in other French wine region, quality and quantity were very satisfactory on our whole vineyard and were are very pleased with the quality of the vinified juices currently ageing in 228 L. Burgundian barrels in our cellars.
Harvest took place on our vineyards between the end of August (27th) and the 18th of September under a hot and persistent autumn sun. Even if the weather was very nice, the harvest period was very long and demanding in the vineyards as well as in the winery, due to the particularly different stages of ripeness. This is, without doubt, what one will retain from this harvest: so different ripeness degrees and so very different harvesting time from a village to another and even from a parcel to another in the same vineyard!
White wines were mostly harvested first in order to keep a nice acidity on this particularly solar vintage.