Rully sits at the top of the Côte Chalonnaise, five miles south of Chassagne-Montrachet on the same south-southeast band of clay and limestone. For most of the last century its grapes went up the road to the négociant houses of Beaune. Vincent Dureuil took over Domaine Vincent Dureuil-Janthial from his father, Raymond, in 1994, inheriting vines from the Janthial side of the family that has worked this village for centuries, and farmed them the way his grandfather had: earth ploughed up around the trunks each winter against frost, no herbicides after 2001, organic certification in 2009. In the cellar he presses his chardonnay whole cluster and hard, lets the juice go dark brown in the press before adding any sulfur twelve hours later, then ferments on indigenous yeasts in lightly toasted 225-liter barrels from Chassin in Beaune, a fifth of them new. The whites spend twelve months in wood and six in tank and are bottled unfined and without filtration on the lunar calendar. William Kelley of The Wine Advocate ranks this the finest domaine in the Côte Chalonnaise, and Jean-François Coche of Coche-Dury has said that when he sees the name on a wine list, he stops reading and orders it.
Vincent bottles two wines from Le Meix-Cadot, a premier cru on the terrace just south of the village whose name joins the old Burgundian word for a farmstead to what was probably the farmer's surname. This one comes from roughly a hectare across three adjoining lieux-dits, Le Meix Cadot, La Chaume and La Bergerie, all facing east on limestone and clay, and all among the sunniest, earliest-ripening ground the domaine farms. The vines were planted in 1975, which at this address makes them the younger parcel; the century-old rows alongside go into a separate old-vine bottling. 2016 tested every row of it. Frost on the night of April 27, summer hail and a late surge of mildew took more than three quarters of the domaine's crop, and the fruit that came through was concentrated by everything that was lost.
At ten years the wine has come fully into its own: Meyer lemon and ripe Anjou pear, acacia honey, a toasted-almond richness from oak that has long since been absorbed, and the chalky grip that runs through all of Vincent's whites. Medium-full and silky through the middle, it finishes long on lemon oil and wet stone. Drink through 2031.
