Producer note: Winemaker Frédéric Weber is always a wealth of detail regarding the intricacies of the growing season and regarding the 2018 vintage, he explained that "the winter was relatively mild with double the normal rainfall between October 2017 and April 2018. April and May were dry and warm, so the vegetation exploded as the soil provided ample supplies of water. We were further blessed with a precocious and very fast flowering where there was almost no shatter. This in turn engendered an enormous fruit set so it was clear early on that absent a destructive bout of hail that we were definitely going to have good volumes and particularly so in white. As such we chose to drop quite a bit of chardonnay bunches in July and August. Despite the abundant early season rainfall, the summer was quite dry and sufficiently so that young vines or those planted in more meager soils suffered from hydric stress. We could see this in the fact that the véraison took a long time to finish. Thankfully an August 23rd storm dropped enough water to allow the vines to bring the fruit to full maturity. After doing a long series of ripeness sampling, we finally chose to begin picking on the 28th of August with the pinot and then attacked the chardonnay on the 3rd of September. The fruit was impeccably clean, and yields were very good in both colors with between 38 to 40 hl/ha in pinot and between 48 to 60 hl/ha in chardonnay. Potential alcohols were equally good, ranging as they did between 13.5 to 14% in pinot and slightly higher in chardonnay at between 13.5 to 14.5%. For the reds we used between 15 and 50% whole clusters and vinified softly as the skins were thick with a high degree of extractability plus there were more seeds than usual so we did everything we could to avoid damaging them. Another big factor is that we had no fermentation stoppages but that doesn't mean that we weren't worried about the possibility of them. With respect to the reds, some people want to compare them to the 2003s but we don't really agree. To be sure, 2018 was consistently very warm and dry but it wasn't as extreme as 2003 plus yields were much higher. Speaking for our wines, we would suggest that they're like a mix of 2005 and 2009, which is to say that we believe that 2018 is potentially a great vintage." Weber added that Bouchard purchased very few wines for the négociant side of the operation, partially because the domaine vines produced such good volumes but also because the quality of the wines on offer was too often suspect. He also noted that for the reds that are already in bottle that they were put there between October 2019 and January 2020. (Henriot, Inc., www.henriotinc.com, NY, USA; The Rare & Fine Wine Company Limited, www.therareandfinewinecompany.com, and John E. Fells and Sons, www.fells.co.uk, both UK).