2008 Pommard 1er Cru

Constituting primarily the crop from young vines in his monopole Clos des Epeneaux, Leroux’s 2008 Pommard 1er Cru mingles lightly-cooked strawberry and rhubarb with smoked meat on a firm, slightly brittle, and distinctly tart palate. There is excellent persistence here but for now, at least, not enough complexity or dynamic to compensate for lack of richness. I don’t doubt this will be good wine for drinking over the next 5-7 years, but will it be better than that, or longer-lived? Hopefully it is stressed from recent assemblage and will bounce back soon. The decision not to make a third, exclusively young vines cuvee from the Clos this year, says Leroux, was determined not by his small crop, but by the lighter, more elegant style of the vintage that he felt comfortably accommodates all of the fruit of his young vines into a premier cru bottling. Benjamin Leroux experienced the latest picking of his career in 2008 (not commencing until September 29) and second earliest in 2007 (commencing August 30, but then with fits and starts). As he was the first to bring up, though, the former would have been deemed “normal” two decades or more ago. “For all the difficulties we had in the vineyards,” he remarked, “in the end 2008 was easy to harvest, since the prolonged north wind took care of the triage. In fact, we did more triage in the cellar in 2009 than in 2008. And, like 2007, the vinification was not complicated. The yields, though, were down in 2008 to a mere 20 hectoliters per hectare, except in the Clos des Epeneaux, where we got 25.” The 2008s here were in tank awaiting bottling when I tasted them in mid-April – having at last finished malo-lactic conversion in autumn – all but one having only recently been racked from barrel. (For wines and news of Leroux’s negociant project, see my notes under the heading “Leroux.”) A Becky Wasserman Selection, Le Serbet (various importers); fax 011-333-80-24-29-70