2022 Domaine Vincent Dancer Chassagne-Montrachet Village
The Wine Advocate
RP (89-91)
Reviewed by:William Kelley
Release Price:NA
Drink Date:N/A
Dancer's 2022 Chassagne-Montrachet Village offers up aromas of toasted nuts, bread dough, spices, green apple and pear, followed by a medium-bodied, satiny and saline palate that's bright and pure, exhibiting a finer-boned, less overtly rich profile than is sometimes the case for this bottling.
It has been several years now since Vincent Dancer's son Théo took the reins here, and the evolutions continue. An agroforestry project in the Hautes-Côtes is underway, combining vineyard development with fruit trees and flowering verges. Along the Côte, Dancer is now pruning without a cane and attaching his vines to individual "échalas" stakes, reducing cultivation of the soils to the bare minimum. In the cellar, Théo has banished all new oak (never an important presence, in any case, at this address), instead preferring to purchase used larger-format barrels from another winemaker. The cellar has also been given a thorough clean. The 2022 portfolio is shaping up very nicely, with all the wines exhibiting lovely purity and precision, something that isn't to be taken for granted at an address where fermentations may take the better part of a year to complete, and where laboratory analysis is viewed with ambivalence, if not outright hostility. Like his father, Théo continues to experiment with Diam closures, but rather than mixing them with natural cork within a cuvée, he's now simply bottling some cuvées under Diam and others under natural cork.