2006 Corton Le Rognet

Harvested – as usual – around a week ahead of his other sites (but at 13.8% natural alcohol), Ambroise's 2006 Corton Le Rognet inhabits a very different world from his other wines of this vintage. Lightly-cooked but tart-edged red raspberry, dark chocolate, crushed stone, and savory salinity combine for an expression of palpable density and impressive richness allied to vivacity and invigoration, and with floral and spirituous red and black fruit overtones. This lean, big-boned, yet fleet-of-foot athlete is likely to be a 10-12 year distance runner, and I suspect it will reveal further fascination in 2-3. It came as no surprise that Bertrand Ambroise would strive for ripe, concentrated, structured Pinots even in 2006, but I was amazed at the degree to which he succeeded with an approach that by his own admission was little different from that he had taken with his 2005s. Ambroise played-down a hypothesis I had begun to develop that Nuits-St.-Georges was especially favored in 2006, and added that he experienced less variability in ripeness from one Cotes de Nuits vineyard to another than was to be the case in 2007. Triage in 2006, reports Ambroise, was minimal, and performed primarily on cull under-ripe, not rot-afflicted bunches and berries. He left the young wines on their lees as long as he felt able, in order to retain a sense of freshness and vivacity, he said, as much as to enhance what was already manifestly going to be an unusual amount of body and palpable density for the vintage. (For further details concerning Ambroise's general methodology, readers are referred to my report in issue 171. As in other instances, I have not noted distinguished in their formal descriptions between estate wines and those Ambroise farms on contract.) Importer: Robert Kacher Selections, Washington, DC; tel. (202) 832-9083