Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru En Redrescul Monopole

En Redrescul is the steepest vineyard in Savigny-lès-Beaune, a Premier Cru of about 65 ares that the Doudet family owns outright, hence the Monopole on the label. The house's sheet puts the name down to that slope; the soil is gravelly chalk in the house's description and clay-limestone in the family's, and the exposure is east to north-east. Everything on it is done by hand and by horse because a tractor cannot hold the gradient. It is planted to Chardonnay alone, and the family calls it the only Premier Cru of the appellation made exclusively in white, a curiosity in a village known for red.

The 1966 is a bottle from the cellars under the house at 3 rue Henri Cyrot, whose oldest part dates from 1820 and where the house keeps its older vintages, in its own words a treasure hidden deep in the old cellars. The wine was bottled on 24 January 1968, sixteen months after the harvest. The back label says the wines are neither filtered nor cold-stabilised and warns, politely, that a bottle may therefore carry a little natural deposit and that a pass through a carafe will fix it. How the family made its whites in 1966 is not written down. For the current Redrescul the family describes settling and the start of fermentation in steel, then fifteen months in barrel with a quarter new, while the house's sheet gives thirteen months and a fifth new.

1966 gave Burgundy a mediocre summer to the end of August, then a fine September that ripened the crop and stayed fine through a harvest that began around the 28th. This bottle has had sixty years since to show what that September was worth.