2022 Domaine Joseph Colin Chassagne-Montrachet "Hereditas"

Bursting with aromas of peach, pear, crushed mint and buttery pastry, the 2022 Chassagne-Montrachet Village is medium-bodied, ample and textural, with a pure core of fruit and a saline finish. It's derived from several parcels on the alluvial fan. Joseph Colin—who left Domaine Marc Colin to start a domaine of his own in 2016—is now ensconced in a brand-new, gravity-flow winery on the outskirts of the village. Colin's approach, as I've written before, is to pick ripe grapes, press whole bunches and barrel down without the addition of sulfites or any settling—sulfur dioxide is added only at bottling (which takes place under Diam closures). Maturation now takes place almost exclusively in large 500- or 600-liter barrels. Wines that are more generously sulfured, he acknowledges, are more tensile and tight-knit, but the tension, he argues, comes from the sulfur, not the terroir. And Colin is happy with what he describes as "a certain immediacy" that comes from low-sulfur élevage, a quality that was manifest in his pretty, precise, expressive 2022s that emphasize the vintage's elegant side.(WK)