2008 Chambolle Musigny Les Gruenchers

Soy, black pepper, ginger, and smoked meat lend an oriental as well as slightly reductive tone to the nose of Dujac’s 2008 Chambolle-Musigny Les Gruenchers, which then fills the mouth with pungently-accented ripe plum. This displays lingering grip and spice but is relatively robust and anything but an illustration of Chambolle tenderness or delicacy. (Ordinarily, Seysses would serve this cru before his Combottes, but it’s easy to see why he chose on this occasion to reverse that order.) Fine, palate-saturating tannins help convince me that this demands 4-5 years in bottle and ought to perform well 7-10 years from now. The Dujac 2008s were not racked until last December, and bottling took place January through March. “The malic acid numbers were high-ish, but not significantly higher than in, say, 2006 or 2001,” says Jeremy Seysses in an effort to explain what he admitted were “for us, excessively late malos. I have a feeling it was a lack of nutrients that were wash out,” he continues, since, after all, “it rained a lot in 2008” with, he adds, “poor fruit set proving to be the vintage’s saving grace. I think we would actually have had less to harvest (i.e. worth keeping) if we had had a better fruit set. There was rot, but can you find it in any of the wines? That’s a credit to how far Burgundy has come along in terms of sorting” (which Dujac does exclusively in the vineyard, not on sorting tables – the name of their U.S. importer ironically notwithstanding). “I didn’t love my lack of options in 2007,” says Seysses of the preceding season, “so we picked early – earlier even than in 2003.” In vinification “we decided not to force too much, and just to keep it charming,” which is exactly how I thought the wines turned out. “At Domaine Dujac, we’re never been that attached to deep color, so we’re quite tolerant (in that regard), and the least thing we wanted to do was make hard wines. I de-stemmed more (than usual, or than in 2008). The fruit felt fragile, so in barrel I kept the wines under a bit more free sulfur than usual, which reinforced their lightness.” Seysses opines that 2007 was not a year in which old selections displayed their overall superiority to clones, because “if yo(‘re Pinots) were riper earlier, you were ripe while it was raining,” whereas in 2008 you could scarcely get too much ripeness. Importer: The Sorting Table, Napa, CA; tel. (415) 491-4724

(this finished its malo earlier than most of the other wines in this cellar and had been sulfited a month prior to my visit) Good deep red-ruby. Highly nuanced nose combines wild black fruits, crushed stone and smoky minerality. Broad and sweet, conveying an old-viney intensity (the grapes were very small here), but the wine's harmonious acidity and captivating sappy, smoky minerality give it a rather feminine quality. Finishes with a fine dusting of tannins and subtle building length. (I'll hold off on assessing the Vosne-Romanee Les Beaux-Monts, as the wine was in the middle of its secondary fermentation; even so, it did not appear to be particularly high in acidity.)