Guffens-Heynen Macon-Pierreclos 'Le Chavigne 2020
Guffens-Heynen Macon-Pierreclos 'Le Chavigne 2020
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The 2020 Mâcon-Pierreclos Le Chavigne is composed entirely of free-run and first-press juice this year, and perhaps that's why it's quite so good. Wafting from the glass with notes of citrus oil, crisp green apple, iodine, white flowers and smoke, it's medium to full-bodied, satiny and chiseled, with a racy spine of acidity and a long, mineral finish.
91-93 points William Kelley roberparker.com
When I visited Jean-Marie Guffens this spring, he was lamenting the loss of most of his prospective 2021 crop, ravished by frost just a few weeks earlier. I suspect had circumstances been different, he'd have been elated, as his 2020s and 2019s were showing brilliantly. In fact, at this early stage, 2020 appears to number among the greatest vintages of Guffens's career. This accelerated growing season culminated in an extended harvest, adapted parcel by parcel as hydric stress in some sites had delayed ripening. Guffens argues that picking late in years such as this tends to deliver lower pHs, as acidities concentrate by dehydration, and his viticulture—minimal hedging combined with cover crops—is well-adapted to warm, dry conditions; and the results in 2020 vindicate that contention, as pHs are incredibly low despite elevated levels of maturity. Yields were in keeping with the domaine's 10-year average, which is to say decidedly low by white Burgundy standards, but not so exaggeratedly low as in 2019. The result is wines of extraordinary structure, concentration and energy, refuting the false choice sometimes posited between richness and freshness by uniting those characteristics in a strikingly compelling union. The 2020 vintage is shaping up to be a prodigious success for white Burgundy, and as the reviews here make clear, I fully expect Guffens's wines to number among the year's very finest. So much for the 2020s, but what of the 2019s? Revisited from bottle, these have turned out very nicely indeed, too. Super concentrated and incisive, readers might think of them as an even more intense version of Guffens's 2017s—or, it may be, a modern-day version of his 1989s. Even if they make for dramatic drinking out of the gates, they will require and reward patience if readers want to see they realize all their potential.
Diam. The Chavigne Pierreclos vineyard lies on a very steep slope of rich brown clays with countless pierrailles, or small stones. Of all his vineyards, “I love Mâcon-Pierreclos, the most,” Guffens told us, “because it was our very first vineyard and no one wanted it because it was too steep.”
