The Crown Prince of Volnay:
For a hundred years and running, Marquis d'Angerville has been the premiere estate in Volnay. In the 1920s, the Marquis d'Angerville of the time, Mr. Jacques d'Angerville, was a major disruptor and trailblazer in the domaine-bottling movement. The Marquis was publicly critical of the negociants' fraudulent practice of blending wines in the cellar, even to the point of being issued a lawsuit to calm his outcries. As a result, he began to bottle his own wines. As the standard bearer for age-worthy, collectible Volnay, these wines offer a panoply of polished, supple Pinot fruit sprinkled with spice and sophisticated minerality.
The domaine's Volnay 1er Cru bottling is mostly made up of Les Mitans (0.65 hectares) and Les Pitures (0.31 hectares).
From William Kelley at The Wine Advocate:
"The 2017 portfolio is charming, perfumed and emphatically Volnaysien at the Domaine Marquis d'Angerville, and Guillaume d'Angerville and his team should be very proud of their achievement. The suppleness and charm of the vintage at its best has tempered the muscularity of which the Domaine's more structural wines—Champans, Taillepieds and Clos des Ducs—are capable in firmer, more tight-knit vintages, but these Volnays don't lack depth or concentration. The obvious analogy is with the Domaine's 2007s. Followers of d'Angerville will be familiar with the protocol here: destemmed grapes, classical macerations and élevage in barrels of which 20% are new, older barrels generally being retained for five vintages. While the wines aren't marked by new oak, they aren't quite as backward and slow to evolve as they were in the days of Guillaume d'Angerville's father, and that will be especially true of these 2017s, wines that will in many cases deliver a great deal of pleasure in the near- and medium-term."
