2006 Pommard Les Rugiens

Charlot's 2006 Pommard Rugiens offers abundant, ripe red raspberry and red currant with savory salinity and underlying suggestions of peat and forest floor. The tannins here are a bit more obvious and the finish a bit gruff in comparison with the other best wines in the present collection, but this is energetic and emphatic Pinot that should be well worth returning to over the next 5-7 years. The characteristically crisply-edged Pinot style favored by Jean-Pierre Charlot resulted in a collection of generally bright, delicate, but lean and selectively astringent 2006s. Charlot says triage was needed for culling grapes that had been subjected July sunburn, as well as for eliminating under-ripeness and rot. He professed satisfaction with by the standards of the vintage relatively low natural alcohol levels of 11.5-12.5%, and chaptalized lightly. Only the Bourgogne was deemed to require filtration, and Charlot says he prefers paying the price of a bit higher dosage of SO2 to submitting his Pinots to that trauma. Importer: Vintage 59, Washington, DC; tel. (202) 966-9218