2022 Domaine Sylvain Pataille
On a trip to France in 2008, I met Sylvain Pataille and have been closely watching his journey ever since. In all the years I’ve been visiting domaines, this man's passion for growing grapes, making wine, and all things related is unmatched and to say he is well respected in the world of Burgundy wine would be an understatement.
In 1999, Pataille started his domaine with merely 1 hectare of vines but has since grown to present day size of 15 hectares, with most vines in Marsannay. He has a passion for aligote as well as pinot noir and has been certified organic long before it was fashionable. He is also one of the leading minds in the biodynamic movement, (although he himself is not certified) and he is a consulting enologist to some of the biggest names in the Côte d'Or.
His approach to winemaking is one of minimal intervention. The vinification process is long and slow with the use of some whole clusters, depending on the vintage. Only indigenous yeasts are used, with sulfur only being added at bottling. Between 15-30% new barrels are used. Fairly standard elevage with barrel aging being approximately 15 months, although some cuvees could see almost 2 full years. He lets the wines tell him what they need as there is no set formula.
Since 2008, there have been rumblings that several of the Marsannay vineyards, Clos du Roy in particular, deserve to be elevated to Premier Cru. I don’t think there has been all that much advancement of this idea since. That said, several of Sylvain’s vineyards in Marsannay produce wines which handily rival some of the top premier crus in the Cote!
Chez Pataille has turned out yet another successful vintage for 2022. I think this quote extracted from Burghound sums up the vintage perfectly in Sylvain’s words -
“(2022) growing season had a difficult start with the massive June storm but in the end, it proved to be our salvation because otherwise the super-hot and dry conditions would have caused the vines to shut down completely. The fruit was clean and averaged around 13% in terms of potential alcohols. As such, the vinifications were straightforward and I used a relatively high proportion of whole clusters. One of the things that has impressed me about the 2022s is that they have tasted good from the very beginning and overall, it strikes me that they likely will do so all their lives. I hope so anyway.”
