Domaine Trapet Chambertin Grand Cru (Magnum) (1.5 L)

When Jean-Louis Trapet's ancestors illegally grafted vines onto American rootstock during the 1880s phylloxera crisis — before the practice was legalised in 1888 — they were acting on the same instinct that defines the domaine today: do what the vineyard demands, not what convention permits. That transgressive clarity now governs every decision in the cellar.

The 1.85-hectare Chambertin holding, spread across three distinct parcels with the oldest vines planted in 1919, sits on gravelly and marl topsoil over a limestone subsoil — a structure that drains freely while retaining enough mineral charge to give the wine its characteristic tensile backbone and site-specific salinity.

Fruit is double-sorted (vineyard and winery, up to 10% rejected), then fermented with native yeasts in open vats with 80–100% whole-cluster inclusion for Grand Crus — a proportion that builds structural complexity and aromatic lift without the extraction typical of Gevrey. No sulphur is added at harvest, during fermentation, or during ageing; a minimal dose is added at bottling only. Ageing runs 18–20 months in French oak barriques (30–75% new, vintage-dependent), with gravity-fed transfers. Bottled unfined and unfiltered.

The philosophical rupture here is rare: Trapet uses near-maximum whole-cluster percentages while simultaneously rejecting the reductive, low-oxygen winemaking that most whole-cluster practitioners rely on — producing a Chambertin that is open and legible from release rather than locked behind reductive shell. The 1.5L magnum format slows oxygen ingress proportionally, extending the drinking window and deepening the mid-palate development over time. The 2021 vintage, a cool and precise year in the Côte de Nuits, delivered wines of vivid acidity and fine-grained tannin structure — expect this to resolve beautifully through the 2030s and beyond.