Domaine Michel Lafarge Volnay Vendanges Sélectionnées 2017

Domaine Michel Lafarge is one of the great producers of the wines of Burgundy, based in the Volnay appellation. The domaine is small, owning just under 25 acres of vines, and producing only about 4,000 cases annually, but the wines are models of their genres. The family has been cultivating grapes in Volnay since the early 19th Century and possibly back to the late 18th Century. Very gradually did the Lafarges accumulate, piece by piece, the portions of vineyards that comprise their domaine; these include Volnay Clos des Chênes and the wholly owned Clos du Chateau des Ducs, Beaune Grêves, Pommard Pezerolles (all Premier Cru) and parcels of Volnay village and Premier Cru, as well as Bourgogne Aligoté and Bourgogne Passetoutgrain and a village Meursault.

Lafarge was a pioneer in bottling its own wine, rather than selling the wine to a negociant, beginning with the harvest of 1934. The wines see only about 25 percent new oak, typically aging for 15 to 20 months, depending on the vintage and the vineyard. The entire domaine has been farmed on biodynamic principles since 1997-2000.

Here is a beautiful tribute to the late Michel Lafarge from the Wasserman's : 'We were asked yesterday what Michel meant as a Burgundian vigneron. But why he was so special, why he touched so many, is not because of what he meant to wine or to Burgundy. It was because of what he meant to humanity. Michel was the most dignified person we knew. He had the metal of a founding father, of a sage, of someone who would have come into our lives straight from the pages of the Old Testament. We privately referred to him as Gandalf. White hair. Baritone. Calm. Rigidly honest. Wise. And also very funny. Though we visited him in his cellar in Volnay, we might as well have been seeking the counsel of a Druid under an ancient oak tree. And if we asked him about the vintage because he was a repository of knowledge of every harvest going back to the twenties, we might as well have been asking him what to do, how to act —about life. What we never spoke about was commerce. Our most sincere condolences to the Lafarge family, to Burgundy, to humanity.'