Brisk dense purple with an impressive weight of fruit on the nose which has stayed fresh. Like the village Chambolle the acidity is unexpectedly high so we will have to see how this settles down. This is certainly very backward, but is in balance. Tasted: December 2019.
89-92 Allen Meadows - Burghound
An attractively fresh though notably ripe nose is comprised by notes of poached plum, spice and violet hints. There is impressive intensity to the beautifully well-detailed flavors that culminate in a crunchy and chiseled if slightly lean finish. This may well flesh out with a few years of bottle age and my predicted range assumes this will happen.
Product Description:
Benoît Landanger, who has assumed the direction of this domaine and has converted it to biodynamic farming principles, noted that "one would think that a hot and dry vintage like 2018 would have been simple to manage but in fact it was surprisingly complicated for a variety of reasons. The most complicated of all was deciding on the optimal moment to begin the harvest. Despite a fast and even flowering, maturities were uneven in many of our parcels, so the picking order wasn't the same as it usually was. I finally chose to begin on the 27th of August, and we brought in very clean and ripe fruit that had good alcohols and fine yields, indeed they were about the same as what we realized in 2017. I also chose to vinify very softly for fear of extracting too much tannin and thus unbalancing the wines. In the end, I think we got most decisions right, but I confess to stressing about a lot of little details." Once again, I had a chance to taste three wines that were vinified exactly the same as the regular cuvées but were raised in amphora; this is to say the En Caillerets, Clos de la Bousse d'Or and the Clos des 60 Ouvrées vineyards. I note these using the term amphore in the reviews, but the actual terminology found on the label reads "Vinifié et Élevé en Amphore". - Allen Meadows