Domaine SC Guillard Gevrey-Chambertin Vieilles Vignes ‘Aux Corvées’ 2020

Why is this Wine so Yummy?

About SC Guillard

The honesty of the Guillard wines is striking. The fruit has serious depth and length, the tannins great quality. When young, they can appear very tightly wound often needing 12-24 months to resolve. Boy … when they do you’re in for some fun they deliver earthy opulent fruit and the acid is balanced long and fine definitely some classic Gevrey characters coming through. Great density and length of fruit I can see now why they are happy with the perceived higher acid when the wine is younger. As the wine has settled the acid is helping to tame the incredible richness of some superb fruit, bring the wine into balance as it matures gracefully.

Domaine Guillard is definitely under the radar. The owner, Michel does not own a computer. He does not have a cellar door and rarely opens his door, that is if you manage to find his winery. He has a fax machine but admits with a grin that he often does not put paper in it.

Tom, who with his partner Nadege imports the wine, found the Domaine by accident in 1992 when he did his first vintage in Burgundy and they have been going back regularly since then. Sometimes they were lucky enough to find Michel in his cellar and have managed to buy some wine, sometime not.

After many years of buying his wines, they managed to convince Mr Guillard to let them import a few bottles in Australia.

The Domaine was created by Michel’s Grand-mother, Jeanne Lyonnet.Born in 1882, she lived and worked in Gevrey as a maid.  She married in 1909 but soon after her wedding, her new husband Auguste had to go to war. She worked hard and saved enough money to buy her first few vines in 1913. When Auguste nicknamed Henri IV  came back from the war, he worked as a labourer for some big Gevrey Domaines.

In 1937 after much sacrifice, they bought their first piece of premier cru; Les Corbeaux.

In 1958 their only daughter and her husband André Guillard took over the domaine adding to the few vineyards already purchased. However, they still had to maintain a second job as labourers to sustain the family business.

Finally, Michel and his sister Odette upon retirement of their parents took over in 1979.

Both generations added slowly to the estate, but Michel speaks with great admiration and devotion about his dedicated grandmother who has been able, by pure hard work and determination to be a landowner, in what would of been an unusual occurrence in those days, a house cleaner buying a vineyard in one of the most sought after village of Burgundy!

In the Vineyard

There is not much info on the vineyard. Suffice it to say the vine age and sites combined with whatever vineyard practices are being used are yield delicious wines in the glass.

In the Winery

As with the vineyard we rely on what’s in the glass to tell us that whatever is happing in the winery works!

The 2020 Vintage in the Côte de Nuits

As to the wines 2020 produced, there was once again a lot of head-scratching among the approximately 120 producers that I visited. No one, at least no one that I spoke with, seems to understand how a blazing hot and exceeding dry growing season produced such beautiful, and beautifully fresh and vibrant, wines. To be sure, they are clearly ripe, yet despite having only average acid levels, the pHs are pretty much textbook and even somewhat lower than in 2019 and noticeably lower than in 2018. Their moderately firm tannic spines coupled with good acid levels provide the framework to allow the wines to be highly energetic, wonderfully refreshing and delineated. Moreover, and most importantly, the high heat did little to efface the transparency of the underlying terroir.

Back to the head-scratching over the unexpected results of the 2020 vintage (we can add 2019 to the conundrum as well) for a moment, the current theory that is much in vogue among producers, is that the vines are gradually adapting to the stresses of persistent high heat and water paucity. To be sure, the Burgundians are not above deservedly patting themselves on the back for having implemented certain viticultural changes, but even so, what they’re doing appears to be working so it’s a win-win situation. This is all the more impressive when 2020 can be accurately described as one of the hottest and driest vintages since the beginning of the 21st C while tolerating an incredible 62% less precipitation and more than 275 to 300 hours of additional sunlight. The latter statistic is particularly eye-popping as it implies the equivalent of an extra 23 to 25 twelve-hour days of sunlight! There are some important nuances regarding the temperatures because average heat is not the same as having periods of extreme heat, but suffice it to say for the summary that it was damn hot.

Allen Meadows, Burghound

Where in the World are They?

Guillards 1er Cru’s are rest adjacent to Mazi in the case of Corbeaux and Clos-Saint-Jacques in the case of Lavaux and Poissenot.

In Gevrey-Chambertin, the various classifications are uncharacteristically (for Burgundy) well separated. It’s all down to geology; north of the Combe (and the village) lie a majority of the 26 premier cru vineyards. They are planted on Bajocian Ostria Acuminata marls mixed with red alluvia and slope wash – to you and me, that’s red clay soil. There are no grand crus here. To the south of the village lie the nine grand crus, planted on hard Bajocian crinoidal limestone with shallow soils – still characteristically red. Satellite premier crus can be found here, clinging to the coattails of some grand cru appellations. The quality drops off quickly as you head east into the alluvial plain i.e. towards the RN74 and the railway line beyond. The soil is still red, but you have to go much, much deeper to reach the bedrock.