Nathalie Richez 5 Items Follow

In a region dominated by the landed, Nathalie—not born into a winemaking family—built up her 12-hectare domaine from scratch beginning in 2011, acquiring small plots in unheralded appellations here and there as she could afford them. Nathalie is guided by her deep love of Burgundy, and while it must perhaps be tempting for a newcomer to stamp their wines with an abundance of personality, hers are egoless, unassuming, and strikingly transparent. Nathalie’s home is the little town of Chagny, on the border of the Côte de Beaune and the Côte Chalonnaise; she vinifies her wines in a spartan room adjacent to her house, in steel and fiberglass tanks, and her barrel cellar is a couple of gravel-floored chambers beneath an old stone shed in the backyard. All her wines, from humblest to grandest, pass 12 to 18 months in 20% new oak—low-toast barrels from a tiny local one-man operation. She destems everything fully, allows fermentations to proceed spontaneously, and only applies sulfur after malolactic is complete—an utterly nonradical regimen that serves her wines’ sense of classicism. She works without chemical herbicides in the vineyards and regularly aerates the soil, but she chooses not to adapt a “practicing organic” label, as she wants to retain the flexibility to employ her best judgment in every situation. Nathalie’s vineyards encompass holdings in both the southern reaches of the Côte de Beaune and the northern portions of the Côte Chalonnaise, and of her 12 hectares she only currently bottles three and a half hectares’ worth, selling the remainder of her fruit to Drouhin and Jadot. Like Nathalie herself, her wines are friendly, frank, unassuming, and immediately likable—Burgundies that may not reflect a deep family history of winegrowing but are as irresistibly pure as they come.