Colour : Bright ruby red.
Nose : floral bouquet with elegant peony and rose petals notes.
Palate : a gourmet, well-balanced and harmonious wine, with a lot of fruit, in particular ripe cherry and delicate pepper and spices notes. A lovely mellowness and a nice velvety texture in the mouth.
A great companion to white and red meats such as a rack of lamb, pork tenderloin, entrecote steak, or a plate of French cheeses.
Domaine de la Bressande is located in the village of Mercurey, one of the oldest terroirs of Burgundy and also the native village of Maison Antonin Rodet.
The estate vineyard extends now around 33 hectares (81,5 acres) spread over the villages of Mercurey and Rully and offers upper quality wines from both appellations including Premiers Crus such as this Rully 1er Cru Chapitre.
The "Chapitre" parcel covers 3,75 Ha (9,26 acres) and use to belong to the famous canons from the St. Vincent Cathedral in Chalon.
Our plot covers 0,186 Ha (0,46 acre) for a maximal production of 4 barrels (912 barrels). The first vintage was vinfied in 2014.
The Pinot Noir grapes were hand harvested and then carried to the winery in 16 kg crates to protect them. They were then sorted and totally destemmed to avoid any kind of bitterness or unwanted vegetal aromas.
Maceration lasted about 14 to 18 days in order to get wines with a deep color, complex aromas and as a consequence a good ageing potential.
Traditional vinification was then carried out in temperature-controlled concrete vats (this allows us to master the fermentation temperatures thanks to the great inertia of concrete vats) with punching of the cap during the pre-fermentation phase and at the beginning of fermentation, then daily pumping-over.
Then, the wine was aged for 9 months in oak barrels with 25% new oak to bring the perfect touch of toasted aromas to the wine and ripe tannins.
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!
Reds, in their purple violine dress, early augured a rich and powerful vintage.
Grape variety
Vintage : 2018
