2023 Musigny

The king of the cellar is the 2023 Musigny Grand Cru (Domaine Louis Jadot), a deep and layered wine redolent of dark berries, damask roses, exotic spices and blood orange. Deeper-pitched than the Amoureuses, it's full-bodied, velvety and vibrant, with a dense, seamless mid-palate and a long, expansive finish.

The 2023 Musigny Grand Cru has a complex bouquet that just needs a few swirls of the glass to reveal its mineral-driven red berry fruit with hints of marmalade and brown spices. This is really nuanced and engaging, though it is more discrete than the previous vintage. The palate is beautifully balanced with fine but firm tannins to frame it, judiciously spiced with touches of leather and earthy notes toward the finish. There is impressive length and depth to this Musigny, though it will of course require four to five years in bottle. Excellent. As tradition dictates, I undertook a comprehensive tasting of around 100 wines from Louis Jadot at the winery in Beaune, divided into two sessions for the white and red. Readers should note that I interviewed head winemaker Frédéric Barnier. "The wines are 0.5% higher in alcohol in 2023 than 2022, but with exactly the same level of acidity," he adds, after I had filmed the video. "Everything from our own vineyards was around 13.5% while some fruit that we bought was over 14%. Many of the vines resisted excessive sugar accumulation. We introduced foudres so there is less oxygen whilst using the same level of SO2. The challenge was the purity of both the reds and the whites. The fermentation was not so easy for the latter, and we stopped the malolactic a little earlier. There is 0.8gm/L malic acid on 2022 and 1.1gm/L in 2023. There is 0.5% more alcohol but with the same acidity as the 2022."

The 2023 Musigny Grand Cru has a complex bouquet that just needs a few swirls of the glass to reveal its mineral-driven red berry fruit with hints of marmalade and brown spices. This is really nuanced and engaging, though it is more discrete than the previous vintage. The palate is beautifully balanced with fine but firm tannins to frame it, judiciously spiced with touches of leather and earthy notes toward the finish. There is impressive length and depth to this Musigny, though it will of course require four to five years in bottle. Excellent.