2008 Chambolle Musigny Les Feusselottes

The Tremblay 2008 Chambolle-Musigny Les Feusselottes – recently bottled when I tasted it – smells of kirsch, almond extract, black tea, cardamom, and curry. Fascinatingly spicy, smoky, and brightly-fruited on its firm palate, this proves to be Pinot of immense grip, with deep, roasted meat richness in the finish offering striking counterpoint to the wine’s very treble fruit. It should be especially fascinating to see how this evolves over the next 8-10 years, though I expect enervation rather than harmony to remain the key to its striking virtues. Cecile Tremblay scored some of the most consistent successes of any Cote d’Or Pinot domaine with her 2008 collection and those from among her 2007 bottlings that I was able to sample included a couple of wines exceptionally impressive for that vintage. Tremblay blames irregular flowering and correspondingly disparate ripeness rather than any rot for the 25% of her 2008 fruit that she says was discarded on the sorting table, but pronounces herself “quite content” with the results, a judgment I can only characterize as exhibiting a ridiculous degree of restraint! (And while she didn’t mention it and I didn’t ask to taste it, I saw a lot of 2008 Bourgogne Rose lying around in bins at Tremblay’s temporary cellar quarters in Gevrey.) To convey an idea of the concentration of raw material with which she was working, Tremblay noted that most of her fermentative lots were give only a single pigeage … that’s not per day, but in total. Anywhere from one- to two-thirds of whole clusters with stems were included in the ferments, with the most striking wines tending toward the higher end. The 2008s here (save for three noted) were still in barrels (form which I sampled representatives) when I last tasted, and were due to have been bottled in late spring. Incidentally, Tremblay recovered more of her family’s properties with the 2009 vintage, which also yielded a bumper crop per vine of irresistible ripeness and what appear to be for the vintage unusual depth and verve, so any wine lovers have trouble scoring some bottles of 2008s might get their chance from 2009 despite the hype already surrounding that vintage. Importer: Weygandt-Metzler, Unionville, PA; tel. (610) 486-0800

Rich and sweet and dense. But not quite enough freshness. Very solid indeed. (JR)

The Tremblay 2008 Chambolle-Musigny Les Feusselottes – recently bottled when I tasted it – smells of kirsch, almond extract, black tea, cardamom, and curry. Fascinatingly spicy, smoky, and brightly-fruited on its firm palate, this proves to be Pinot of immense grip, with deep, roasted meat richness in the finish offering striking counterpoint to the wine’s very treble fruit. It should be especially fascinating to see how this evolves over the next 8-10 years, though I expect enervation rather than harmony to remain the key to its striking virtues. Jun 10, www.robertparker.com, Drink: 2010-2020