Róisín Curley, Nuits Saint Georges 'La Petite Charmotte' 2022

This is a very special wine from a very special person. We've know Róisín for many years and have been wowed by her focus and vision in running this amazing project, and the quality of her wines.

We are very lucky and feel greatly privileged to be able to sell some of her wines and the 2022 wines show a vintage that is truly special; wonderfully complex, balanced and generously structured, promising excellent ageing potential with a wide drinking window.

Nuits Saint Georges is the capital town of the Cotes de Nuits appellation, which is the northern half of the Cote d'Or, the heart of quality Burgundy. It typically gives wines that are elegant, complex and perfumed on account of the limestone sub-soil and marble-rich soils. This wine is made from a single named vineyard (Lieu-Dit in French) called "Les Longecourt", which is in the east of the town of Nuits Saint Georges and is planted with vines that average 45 years of age.

This delicious wine is both complex and perfumed, but also shows that wonderful burst of red berries delivered on a really well-integrated palate, that is taut and perfectly balanced, but also rich and round because of the brilliant vintage. Many producers take generations to achieve this quality: this operation began in 2015...

Broadly speaking, Róisín gives her wines a very light fining and filtration in order to preserve the natural character of the grapes terroir as much as possible. Indeed, some of her wines are left completely unfiltered. For the winemaking itself, she uses concrete tanks or small vats for fermentation, but seldom made with new oak. In the vineyard at harvest, and in the winery, too, she does a massive amount of sorting of the grapes (called triage in the vineyard) which has sometimes reduced her potential output up to 50%, such is her determination for the best quality. The standards that she achieves has allowed her access to some of the best coopers and she now uses a mix of different barrel suppliers, buying more each of the last six harvests in which her wines have been made.

The grape suppliers for Róisín's wines are mostly all farming organically and the wine-making philosophy is very definitely hands-off and low-intervention, allowing for terroir and variety to shine. Regular trips to the region and long-term relationships with the growers allow for total control of the process, which again gives such scintillating quality. Certainly the reaction from the growers themselves is immensely positive and this has to be the highest form of praise one could wish to attain.

The prices have stayed very high: demand for Premium Burgundy is still at full-throttle and though 2022 was a year with an abundant crop, the shortages of 2021 mean that there is still some catch-up to be played before prices even begin to look to being reduced, let alone normalised.

Róisín is not only a winemaker and micro-negotiant (which means that she buys the grapes rather than owning the vineyards), she is a full-time pharmacist in Ballyhaunis, County Mayo, and she is a Master of Wine.

Her enthusiasm for wine led to her turning a hobby into this incredible alternate life with, via lengthy studies that led her to work in Chateau Latour (yes, the Chateau Latour), Chateau Grillet in the Rhone, Geisenheim in the Rhein and Montpelier. A forensic characteristic is certainly the thing that comes to mind, yet not at the expense of being a jolly good person.