The 1999 Cru Barréjats is a wine with a marked character: high acidity, great richness, pronounced aromas of citrus, zest and saffron. It is a wine that compels the table and asks to measure itself. The length and tension of the wine due to the acidity lead it to surprising pairings: roast pork à la sept o’clock accompanied by prunes, sweet/savory shortbread with saffron…
The 1999 vintage as seen by Mireille Daret:
1999: The wine-growing year was quite chaotic, throughout Bordeaux. The Sauternes region has not escaped alternating periods of rain and high temperatures. The month of July was particularly gloomy. The bright sun finally settled in mid-August and persisted until mid-September. This late ripening allowed our grapes to keep a lot of acidity. Botrytis, which developed in the second half of September with the return of rain, further concentrated this acidity.
Under the sun, the 1999 harvest began on the first of October and ended on the nineteenth of the same month, two days before the return of rain. In fact, there were only two sorting that followed one another, the ten days between the two passes allowing the grapes to botrytize fully. Every day we sorted, grain by grain, relentlessly, with 14 people on 4 hectares.
The hydraulic vertical pressing allows us to extract without crushing, in three very slow presses until noon the next day, all the sugars and aromas trapped in these candied Botrytis grapes. From then on, everything is decided: the quality of the Cru Barréjats, an expression of the terroir, the fruit and the Botrytis, can be tasted in the musts that flow from the press!
The musts were very rich, very homogeneous, with marked aromas of citrus, citrus and grapefruit. When the winemaker harvests such beautiful fruit, the winemaking must have only one goal: to preserve this aromatic expression in order to bottle only fruit…
Light settling in the cold, fermentation in 100% new barrels (Mercier, Seguin Moreau, Vicard), in a cellar whose temperature we control, cessation of cold fermentation which allows us to reduce the addition of sulphur. The very homogeneous quality of the musts encouraged us to blend our different barrels early, from the first racking. The long but extremely simple ageing, 30 months in new barrels – a wonderful tool for vinification and not for flavouring – a minimum of SO2 and strict hygiene conditions during each annual racking means that the 1999 Cru Barréjats was
Free of viable yeast and bacteria prior to bottling.
As for the 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998 Cru Barréjats, the originality of the vinification of the Cru Barréjats is there: a single very loose filtration during bottling. The Cru Barréjats thus retains all its fruit, all its richness and its complexity.
On May 10, 2002, we bottled the 1999 Cru Barréjats: 3,800 bottles, 3,120 50cl and 100 magnums.
