The most powerful wine in the cellar is the 2019 Volnay 1er Cru Clos des Chênes, a rich, muscular cuvée that offers up notes of plums, cherries, orange rind, spices and burning embers. Full-bodied, ample and muscular, it's deep and layered, with plenty of ripe, fleshy fruit cloaking its broad chassis of tannin.

The 2018 Volnay 1er Cru Clos des Chênes is a deep, powerful wine, opening in the glass with notes of cherries, wild berries, peonies and blood orange, with little hint of the tertiary complexity to come with bottle age. Medium to full-bodied, muscular and textural, this is a rich, velvety and beautifully integrated wine that concludes with a long and expansive finish.

The 2017 Volnay 1er Cru Clos des Chênes wafts from the glass with aromas of raspberries, cherries, citrus peel, rich soil and warm spices, subtly framed by creamy new oak. On the palate, it's full-bodied, with the most depth, dimension and amplitude of any wine in the cellar, its juicy core of fruit entirely cloaking is fine structuring tannins. One of the best renditions of this vineyard I tasted in 2017, it's a very impressive wine.

The 2016 Volnay 1er Cru Clos des Chenes comprises only older, 80-year-old vines that were whole bunch, around one-third of the blend, and the younger vines that were destemmed. It has quite a spicy nose with hints of Moroccan spices filtering through the red and black fruit and hints of sandalwood and sage. The palate is very poised on the entry with fine but firm tannin that lends it a Pommard-like personality. I like the salinity of this Volnay that gets the saliva glands flowing, crisp with an oyster shell finish that is not persistent but just very precise. It just needs a little more finesse to develop with time.