2011 Charmes Chambertin Les Mazoyeres

Bright, full red. Musky red berries, flowers, leather and potpourri spices on the complex nose. Juicy and penetrating, conveying excellent energy and lift to the complex flavors of red fruits, smoky underbrush and saline minerality. Rich, dense and creamy but with lovely restraint. Finishes with a firm edge of tannins and excellent building length. Already quite nuanced but I'd hold this for at least three or four years.

An utterly beguiling wine, the 2011 Charmes-Chambertin Les Mazoyères is constantly changing in the glass. Violets, sage, rosemary, pipe tobacco and cedar meld into a core of deep, resonant black fruit. The 2011 is marked by cool veins of minerality that give the wine its piercing intensity and brightness. At times polished and refined while at other times wilder and more extroverted, the 2011 impresses for its multiple shades of contrast. What a gorgeous wine this is. The 2011 was done with 80% whole clusters and aged in 80% new oak. This is even better from bottle than it was from barrel.

This is almost exuberantly pinot in basic character with its cool, pure and spicy mix of various red berries combined with a broad array of warm earth and a plethora of floral nuances. The big-bodied but round and mouth coating flavors are blessed with an abundance of structure-buffering dry extract that imparts a velvety texture to the mid-palate before terminating in a powerful and impressively long finish that displays only mild rusticity. This is really quite good and worth considering. Tasted: Jan 15, 2014. Drink: 2021+