CHÂTEAU DE MERCEY
SANTENAY 2018
CHÂTEAU DE MERCEY
SANTENAY 2018
Grape variety
Tasting notes
Nose: Aromas of little red fruits with a hint of vanilla.
Palate: A wine full of fruit and elegance with a supple attack, and a structured mouth carried by long and fine tannins.
Wine and food pairing
Serving temperature
History
This is a village appellation of Côte de Beaune, Côte d'Or.
This appellation includes 11 Premier Cru "climats", 280.57 hectares of red wines (109.69 in Premier Cru) and 47.70 hectares of white wines (12.80 hectares in Premier Cru).
This wine is produced on the villages of Santenay and Remigny.
Vinification and maturing
Maceration lasted about 3 weeks in order to get wines with a deep color, complex aromas and as a consequence a good ageing potential.
Traditional vinification was carried out in temperature-controlled concrete vats – that allowed us to master the fermentation temperatures thanks to the great inertia of concrete - with daily pumping-over and stirring occasionally. Alternating those two methods is a good way to obtain balanced wines because the tannins are not too much extracted.
Then the wine was aged for 9 months in oak barrels including 25% new oak.
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.
Reds, in their purple violine dress, early augured a rich and powerful vintage.