2005 Nuits St Georges Clos des Argillieres

The 2005 Nuits-St.-Georges Clos des Argillieres generates intense aromas and flavors of bitter-sweet blackberry, mulberry, herbs and dark chocolate. A rich palate offers more sweetness of black fruit than the other Nuits-St.-George bottlings in this year’s collection, with formidable, firm, yet supportive rather than obtrusive tannins. A good shaking reveals distilled black and blue fruit and herbal essences. For all of this wines brash black fruit bitterness and tartness and for all of its sheer density and abundance of tannin, it nevertheless displays a comforting tendency toward creaminess of texture. It finishes with grip and intensity but no roughness, and it would benefit from up to a decade in one’s cellar. Amboise characterized this year’s fruit as consisting of “perfect berries, solid and well-structured” from which he concluded it should all be de-stemmed and a cautious approach taken to extraction. But caution is relative. Bertrand Ambroise certainly vinifies with a fanatic dedication to quality, but also with no concessions to the faint of heart, and his formidably tannic 2005s will strike some tasters as hyper-concentrated and flirting with over-extraction. Perhaps a bit more refinement and differentiation might have been achieved with a less robust and woody approach? Ambroise works largely with 400-liter barrels in an effort to preserve fruit by diminishing the surface-to-volume ratio and thus the flavoring effects of new wood, but I cannot claim that I would have recognized that fact in the wines themselves. Importer: Robert Kacher Selections, Washington, DC; tel. (202) 832-9083