2013 Domaine Arnoux-Lachaux Latricières-Chambertin Grand Cru

Professional Reviews

Notes

Arnoux-Lachaux has been in Vosne-Romanée since 1858, when Charles Arnoux and Renée Salbreux put two village families together. Robert Arnoux took over in 1957, started estate bottling, and spent four decades adding parcels, including the 0.35 hectares of Romanée-Saint-Vivant he bought in 1984. His son-in-law Pascal Lachaux worked beside him from 1987 until Robert’s death in 1995 and ran the domaine with Florence Arnoux afterward, renaming it Arnoux-Lachaux with the 2007 vintage. The reason the wines are talked about the way they are now is Charles Lachaux, the eldest of their three sons, who joined in 2011, made his first wine in 2012 and has run both vineyards and cellar since 2015. He raised the trellising to about 1.7 meters, stopped leaf-pulling and shoot-trimming, converted to certified biodynamics with grass cover and sheep grazing, gave up ploughing in 2020, and moved to whole-cluster fermentation across the range with short, gentle macerations. Since 2022 some of the wine is raised in sandstone amphorae rather than barrels. The 14.5 hectares cover 15 appellations, including Romanée-Saint-Vivant, Échezeaux, Clos de Vougeot and Latricières-Chambertin, with Vosne premier crus Suchots, Chaumes and Reignots and a run of Nuits-Saint-Georges. Charles has said the changes took about three years to show in the glass, and his own word for the result is precision.