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.
Le Meix-Cadot lies on Rully's second terrace just south of the village, a meix being a farmstead in the old Burgundian dialect and Cadot, most likely, the farmer who worked it. Vincent's great-grandfather Pierre Janthial planted this east-facing acre in 1920, and the vines, now past a hundred years old, give very little fruit. This is the wine that made Vincent's name. When his American importers visited in 1995, Raymond poured them a Meix-Cadot his son had fermented in barrel and bottled unfined and unfiltered over his father's objections, and they took it for Montrachet. Kelley later tasted every vintage of it from 1994 to 2019 in a single sitting for a Wine Advocate retrospective. 2016 was the hardest year of that run: frost on the night of April 27, hail, then a late wave of mildew that forced Vincent to treat the vines and cost the domaine its organic certification, which he spent the next years earning back. What survived was worth it.
Ten years on, the 2016 is in full stride: lemon curd and quince paste, roasted hazelnut, beeswax and chamomile, with the flinty edge of its youth settled into something closer to warm limestone. The palate is broad and dense without any heaviness, carried by the acidity of a cold, short crop, and finishes on salted almond and lemon pith that holds for a long stretch. Drink through 2033.
