Notes of blackberries, cherries and spices introduce Lafon's 2021 Volnay 1er Cru Champans, a medium to full-bodied, ample and fleshy wine built around lively acids and melting tannins, concluding with an orange-inflected finish. It's unusually suave and charming for a young Champans.

The 2020 Volnay 1er Cru Champans reveals aromas of cherries, sweet berries, dark chocolate, rich spices and loamy soil, followed by a medium to full-bodied, layered and concentrated palate framed by powdery tannins and lively acids, concluding with a sapid finish. As with the Clos des Chênes, this represents a particular success in 2020.

The 2019 Volnay 1er Cru Champans is also very elegant this year, but it's deeper-pitched than the more red-fruited Clos des Chênes, bursting with scents of dark berries, petals and spices. Medium to full-bodied, layered and enveloping, it's supple and refined, with powdery tannins and a pretty core of fruit.

Exhibiting aromas of cassis, rich soil tones and smoky blackberries, the richest, most muscular red in the cellar is the 2018 Volnay 1er Cru Champans, a medium to full-bodied, ripe and powerful wine with a fleshy core of fruit and a long, heady finish.

The 2017 Volnay 1er Cru Champans is effectively an old vine cuvée, as the parcel planted in 1922 gave a sufficiently generous crop for Dominique Lafon to relegate most of the fruit from the domaine's 1989 planting to the Volnay Village. The resulting wine is excellent, unfurling in the glass with aromas of cassis, dark chocolate, dried flowers and candied peel. On the palate, it's medium to full-bodied, satiny and layered, with more concentration than the Clos des Chênes, and more length on the finish, too. I'm looking forward to seeing it from bottle.