2007 Corton Charlemagne

(in barrel) Bright yellow. Lemon, lime, menthol and mint on the nose. Dense and sappy, with pungent minerality and captivating sugar/acid cut. Finishes with a strong flavor of crushed stone. Offers terrific potential.

(recently sulfited after an early malo) Cool aromas of pear, apple and spearmint. Juicy and tightly wound, conveying a cool, minty, slightly hard-edged quality and an impression of low fat. This penetrating grand cru shows plenty of rocky soil character but comes off as rather austere today. Needs following.

Still in barrel when I last tasted it, the Prieur 2007 Corton-Charlemagne - grown in an eastern exposure just below woods, and too steep to work by tractor - represents the harvest's last picking. Formidably dense and palpably chalky, its combination of citrus and pit fruits with their pips and pits is relatively austere for the vintage, and the sense of enveloping new wood around this makes for a decidedly bitter-sweet personality. Like the other Prieur 2007s, this boasts creaminess of texture, but there is a certain youthful, woody, as well as mineral-starched stiffness to the finish for now. Sheer concentration, power, and penetration lead one to anticipate a wine that will be worth following for at least 8-10 years. The 2004, by the way, is currently sassy, yet dense, saline, and just beginning to show some intriguing secondary (including carnal and fungal) features. It is a truly great wine in the making that has me imagining white Burgundy as a crossing between Riesling and Pinot Noir! ||Oenologist Nadine Gublin did not begin harvesting the Prieur Chardonnay until September 10, finishing a week later. The wines (with the exception of the Montrachet) all weighed-in between 13-13.5% alcohol and none were chaptalized. Malo-lactic fermentations were slow, the wines were inexpressive early, hence Gublin elected to bottle them 2-4 months later than usual (using a new bottling system). As a result, I have only tasted the best of them as assembled in tank. A comparison of the 2004s side-by-side was fascinating, and among other things bore out Gublin's assertion that -the big difference between 2004 and 2007 was the presence of over-ripeness and of enormous heterogeneity of ripeness- in the former. After the completion of renovations that were ongoing when I visited, the whites in a gravity-flow facility will be vinified entirely separately from the reds, and subject to sophisticated air purification and temperature controls of both tanks and cellar. New tractors and personnel will be on hand from 2010 to assist a transition to organic viticulture. In all these respects, the idealism and ambition exhibited at this estate are formidable. eRobertParker.com.December, 2009