2005 Chambertin

Good deep red with ruby highlights. Complex nose combines blackberry, raspberry, minerals, underbrush and cinnamon. Sweet, rich, full and fine-grained, with lovely purity and juicy lift to its dense dark fruit flavors. This very firmly structured grand cru shows a medicinal reserve today that argues for serious cellaring.

The 2005 Chambertin (again purchased partly as wine and set to total 250 cases) boasts an impressively healthy if not terribly dark purplish-red hue and an aroma combining lightly-cooked black raspberry, beef marrow, and pungent minerality. In the mouth, this offers satisfying plushness and a very low-toned expression of Chambertin, with cooked raspberry, black licorice, wild mushrooms, and wet stones. The sweetness is wonderfully savory but not superficial and the ineffable sense of minerality runs from the aromatic to the tactile. A faint bit of heat creeps into the finish. I miss a bit of the refinement and winsome, wafting florality of the Latricieres, but this too is a truly grand cru with at least two decades potential. Readers are referred to Pierre Rovani’s report in Issue 160 for details on the acquisition of this house in 2002 by Ann Colgin and a group of Americans, and on Becky Wasserman’s directorial role. At only around 4,500 cases, 2005 will represent their largest production yet, “and we’ll stay small,” says young, manifestly-talented winemaker David Croix. Croix works intensively in the vineyard with most of his suppliers. He ages the wines largely in newly-purchased but once-used barrels, augmented by a low percentage of new casks. I tasted all of the wines immediately prior to their first racking which was late, explains Croix (despite malo-lactic fermentations early by 2005 standards), because the quality of the fruit deserved the enrichment and protection of long lees contact and a slightly reduced state. They will be bottled without filtration in March or April. Various Importers. A Becky Wasserman Selection, Le Serbet; fax 011- 333-80-24-29-70.

(a combination of bought and made wine) Good full ruby-red. Serious, brooding, distinctly wild aromas of black raspberry, meat, iron, flint and crushed stone. Densely packed and thick with material; impressively concentrated and broad. This, too, showed superb lushness and sweetness as it opened in the glass. Really saturates the palate on the very sweet, very long aftertaste. Complex, wild Chambertin with terrific breadth on the back.