Domaine Sylvain PATAILLE

Sylvain_Pataille

BOURGOGNE     17 ha     ORGANIC CULTURE     WINEMAKER : Sylvain PATAILLE


ESTATE HISTORY


Native of the Marsannay village, Sylvain PATAILLE is not the child of a winemaker. However, the family owned a few vines and Sylvain, as a child, helped his father and grandfather to produce the few bottles intended for their personal consumption, what made him want to produce his own wine.

With an enological diploma in the pocket, he crisscrossed the Côte d'Or, providing his invaluable advice to several wine estates in the region, an activity that he will definitively stop in 2001.

In 1999, he bought 1 ha of Gamay vines, and a few years later, he acquired 3 ha of Pinot Noir vines to finally reach a current surface of 17 ha, with in particular the famous plots of Clos du Roy, Longeroies, Les Grasses Têtes and La Charme aux Prêtres, for which the Marsannay winegrowers are claiming the 1er Cru designation

During all these years, the domain has been restoring its very old vines and in 2008 it obtained the Organic Winegrowing certification. Currently, its desire to protect the environment pushes the estate to engage in the practice of biodynamic viticulture.

The yields are very low, from 20 to 45 hl/ha, they guarantee the production of concentrated and qualitative grapes. The horse is used to plough a part of the vineyard, around ​​4 to 5 ha, and the grapes that come from this part are dedicated to the production of the ANCESTRALE cuvée.



TERROIR


At the Paleozoic's end, there are -251 million years ago, the marine deposits of the Mesozoic (a following geological period which extends between -251 to -65 million years, including the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous) sediment during the establishment of the first marine transgressive cycle.

The sea reached the Burgundy in the Middle Triassic (-247 to -237 million years ago) favoring clay and sandstone deposits. The gradual transition to a fairly deep open sea led to an essentially marly sedimentation in the Lower Jurassic (-201 to -174 million years ago), followed by the establishment of carbonate platforms within an epicontinental tropical sea, favoring a hundred meters thick deposit of limestone and clay sediments. The Upper Jurassic is marked by a deepening of the marly sedimentation, before the final withdrawal of the sea at the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago.

Later, at the end of the Oligocene (-33.9 to -23.3 million years), tectonic movements cause the collapse of the Fossé Bressan, accompanied by an intense fracturing of the Jurassic marls and limestones which constitute the current base of the Burgundy vineyard.

In the north of the Marsannay village, from the Clos du Roy plot, until the locality La Montagne, the scree and alluvium cover the limestone basement of the Bathonian (-167 to -164 Ma) and the Callovian (-164 to -161 Ma). These brown soils are the best for the production of great wines suitable for a long cellar aging.
Further south, the estate's plots rest on a soil composed of silt and fine clay on the surface which covers the bedrock dating from the Bajocian (-171 to -167 Ma) and made up with Ostrea Acuminata marls and crinoidal limestone. This terroir produces elegant and generally less robust wines than those of the northern slope.
In the village of Couchey, the base is much more faulty, favoring a wide variety of soils within the vineyard. The latter consist mainly of marly limestone from the Callovian period covered sometimes with gravel, sometimes with fine clays and silt. The wines produced from these plots are characterized by their aromatic finesse.



WINEGROWING & WINEMAKING

In the cellar, a large part of the stems are kept during the maceration phase of the red wines, whose duration depends only on one factor: the tasting. The decision to drawn off is only taken when the tasting of the must is convincing.
For the grapes pressing, the estate uses a vertical press which allow the grapes to be pressed gently for 6 to 8 hours for both white and red wines : slow pressing avoids extracting the hard tannins from the grapes and makes it possible to obtain a limpid juice with few lees.

The vinification is done without sulphites addition, "as long as it is not necessary to add any", as Sylvain PATAILLE says. The latter are only used for stabilization purposes, at the time of racking and bottling, and at minimal doses of 1g/hl. In return, the harvest must be flawless and the grapes sorting merciless. All the single-plot wines undergo a long aging phase that lasts between 20 to 24 months, both in barrels and in demi-muids. They are neither fined nor filtered (except white wines) before bottling.

The wines being made almost in the same way from one cuvée to another, they are the pure reflection of their terroir, some have a very strong personality, but all of them offers a quality beyond reproach.


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