2005 Domaine Michel Magnien Clos de la Roche Grand Cru

Deep, saturated red. Deep, smoky nose dominated by decadent earth and underbrush. Then sweet and almost surprisingly tangy, with lovely depth of red fruit, leather and underbrush flavor. Wonderfully dense and thick without coming across as heavy. This opulent grand cru really spreads out and lingers on the back end, with the ripe tannins buried in fruit and earth. With aeration, this gained in energy and thrust. A superb expression of this grand cru.

One of the Magnien domaine’s two grand crus (the other Clos St. Denis, which I found marginally less impressive), their 2005 Clos de la Roche offered an unusually fat, luscious example of this cru, full of dark chocolate and liqueur-like black fruits and with amazingly sweet length, tinged by coconut, caramel and mocha. I cannot say that I could detect a mineral or animal dimension, but there was certainly imposing girth, and a complexity of ripe fruit, spice, and torrefactive elements. PLEASE NOTE: Due to a technical difficulty, I have been regrettably unable to access my taped tasting notes on the enormous range of wines that Frederic Magnien vinifies under his own name as a negociant. Their style is very similar to that of the Michel Magnien wines. A number of his ostensibly lesser cuvees offer striking richness for their price, and a lengthy line-up of celebrated crus included numerous not surprisingly impressive – and indeed flamboyant – wines. There is among these, however, a tendency toward extraneous, toasted-oak sweetness and occasional flirtation with over-ripeness, that will not appeal to some tasters. But readers craving extroverted and sweetly-rich Pinot are going to find a lot to like at Maison Frederic Magnien. The wines Frederic Magnien makes at his family estate seem to exhibit slightly less flamboyance than many of those he vinifies as a negociant, but certainly they are formidably, at times almost overbearingly, palate-staining, with abundant underlying tannins and in most instances lavish sweet spiciness of oak. Due to a technical malfunction, my notes on several of the wines from this domaine are sadly missing. A Peter Vezan Selection (various importers), Paris; fax 011-33-1-42-55-42-93.

(13.9% alcohol) Bright ruby-red. Wild, musky, reduced nose shows an almost liqueur-like dark berry sweetness. Broad, dense and creamy-sweet, with terrific palate-saturating volume. This is large-scaled and impressively long, but today I don't find quite the class of the best of Frederic's negociant wines, like the Clos de Beze and Grands-Echezeaux.