2005 Maison Alex Gambal Bourgogne Cuvée Les Deux Papis

From his own several parcels in Volnay, Gambal’s 2005 Bourgogne Cuvee les Deux Papis gets its name not from old vines (they range from 20-45 years) but from the nickname he and a friend had as the “old farts” in their class at viticultural school. With tart rhubarb and back berry fruit and subtle mineral shadings, this displays impressively refined tannins for its generic appellation and considering that it has been in bottle for only a week and is showing obvious signs of bottle shock in its finish. In the interest of full disclosure as well as history, I should note that Alex Gambal was a retail customer of mine during his days in Washington, DC real estate (probably amassing the proverbial large fortune prerequisite to making a small fortune in the wine business). I met him again when he was honing his French in the employ of Becky Wasserman, just before he entered the Lycee Viticole in Beaune at the improbable age of thirty-nine. It has been almost a decade now since Gambal began his negociant business. With a sophisticated, huge, gravity-fed, and historically-housed facility, increasingly high-quality and long-term grape contracts, gradual accumulation of his own vine acreage, and clearly adept assistance from wine maker Fabrice Laronze, Gambal is demonstrating impressive results with his 4-5,000 cases annually of both red and (60%) white. Several of his 2005 vintage reds had only just been bottled when I tasted. The others had been racked and assembled in tank for early two months, awaiting imminent bottling. Numerous importers. EURL Alex Gambal, Beaune; fax 011-33-3-80-22-21-66