The first chunk of PYCM’s 2018s have just landed!

THE 2018 BURGUNDY VINTAGE

2018 is truly the first vintage where we felt that we were able to comfortably master, from start to finish, the vineyard work, growing season, and harvest, with complete serenity. It all came together in 2018; integrating the new vineyards the two of us have taken control of over the last ten years, and getting our team and harvesters (now as many as 60+) set up perfectly.

The experience gained from having dealt with very warm years such as 2003, 2009, 2015, and now 2018 and 2019 has helped us learn to deal with these increasingly hot vintages. We now make a war plan earlier than ever – August 10th as was the case in 2018. This is five days ahead of years past, which unfortunately for our kids, means shorter summer vacations.

Caroline [Morey] has been emphasizing the need for extra time to make sure all our people are ready the moment we decide to begin harvest. Vacation schedules for our team are now planned to be no more than two weeks in the summer so we can be more reactive to what nature is giving us. Everything has now been adapted to make sure we can get the harvest date right, even if it means advancing the date from September 5th to August 27th, as we did in 2018.

Even with all our planning, it was NOT easy. However, knowing our parcels intimately, having an experienced team in place year-round, having a new cellar that allows us to do all of the presses, vinifcation and elevage for both red and white in one place to effectively keeping everything at the perfect temperature, set us up for success in 2018.Pierre-Yves Colin

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ST. AUBIN

Few people have spent more time in the appellation of St. Aubin than Pierre-Yves Colin. His childhood, family, and much of his wine career are intimately linked to this mother lode of laser textured burgundy.

The appellation of St. Aubin is distinctly unique from most of the Côte de Beaune. Rather than the generally consistent gentle south orientation of the majority of the villages, the hamlets of Gamay and St. Aubin form a bowl that tends to twist and turn with a dizzying array of slightly different expositions, altitudes, gradients, rock and soil types. Most of the vineyards are also at fairly high altitudes that range from 300-400 meters for the top parcels.

PERNAND-VERGELESSES

Pernand-Vergelesses is one of the most picturesque hamlets in France. It is most famous for its portion of Grand Crus – Corton and Corton-Charlemagne – as well as some remarkably textured and chiseled white premier crus and village level wines.

What Pierre-Yves is doing today is investing in serious dirt, working with a very good farmer, and taking these wines to special places. He made it clear that he believes deeply in the place and is intent on making these bottlings part of the same conversation as his high level St. Aubin, Rully, and even Chassagne. This is for now an unbeatable Chardonnay beauty for the money.

BACKGROUND + HISTORY OF THE DOMAINE

With his imposing frame and towering presence, Pierre-Yves Colin can sometimes seem built more for a rugby pitch than a cellar. When in conversation, he listens intently, his intense eyes never averting their gaze. When he speaks, it is with great purpose and determined passion; every word making it clear that you are in the presence of a true master of his craft. In the 15 years since starting his own domaine, the Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey name – or PYCM, as he is also known – has become synonymous with excellence. Today he is one of the most revered vignerons in the world.

Pierre-Yves Colin is the eldest son of the famed Marc Colin, a pioneering vigneron, whose domaine in St. Aubin set the standard for the village since its founding in 1970. After joining his father and brother Joseph in 1996, Pierre-Yves led the property in what would become recognized as a golden age for this historic address. In 2003, after almost 10 years at Domaine Marc Colin, Pierre-Yves and his wife Caroline Morey (an extraordinary vigneron and daughter of Jean-Marc Morey, who today runs her own domaine) decided it was finally time to go off on their own. As he described it, “Working inside a family it’s more difficult to take risks. On your own, the gates are a bit more open.” With a 6-hectare inheritance from his father’s heirloom parcels, along with purchased fruit from top Côte de Beaune growers, the glorious portmanteau of Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey was born.

Walking the vineyards of the Côte de Beaune with Pierre-Yves is a graduate, MIT-level course in terroir studies. It is not hyperbole to say he knows every inch of the vines he farms. This knowledge was fully displayed on a packed bus filled with Skurnik staff and clients in the summer of July 2017, when he grabbed the microphone and guided everyone on a detailed tour of his arsenal of choice parcels. From his top sites in Chassagne and St. Aubin, to the handful of rows of Chevalier-Montrachet, no inquiry was met with even the slightest hesitation; the answers flowed as naturally and gracefully as the water over Victoria Falls.

Since his first vintage in 2004, he immediately caught the world’s attention with wines of unparalleled energy and verve. Even his Bourgogne Blanc put everyone on notice, leading one of the top wine writers in the world, Jancis Robinson, to remark, “It’s not often that a winemaker’s genius can be detected in a bottle of basic Bourgogne. It would be like finding one of the world’s greatest speeches written on the back of an envelope. And yet, when I tasted the Bourgogne Blanc from Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey…it was like discovering the vinous equivalent of the Gettysburg Address.” For anyone who is lucky enough to have tasted a bottle from PYCM, there is a profound tension between the fruit and minerality that makes every sip akin to watching a great gymnast nailing a difficult beam routine. No single element is out of balance, presenting the kind of white Burgundy we dream of, yet so rarely find.

I do things the old-fashioned way, which always takes more time.Pierre-Yves Colin

So where does this magic come from? On the surface, his practices do not seem so revolutionary; he presses his grapes very slowly, racking directly into 350L barrels to allow fermentation to start naturally. He never stirs the lees and the wines see two winters in his gravity-fed, freezing cold cellar under Chassagne, before being bottled unfined an unfiltered. Yet there is an undeniably fantastical quality to the sublime balance found in the wines that reveals an essential truth about the mystery of great wines. There is no clear recipe that one could follow to achieve what Pierre-Yves has achieved, despite the many who try. The magic is in the small, everyday decisions that a vigneron makes based on a combination of instinct and experience. With PYCM, it all comes together to become so much more than the sum of his winemaking parts. To say that he is a great vigneron would be the same as saying Lionel Messi is good at kicking a ball. Definitely true, but it fails to capture the essence of the bolts of lightning found in each bottle of these wax-capped unicorns.