2006 Nuits St Georges Clos des Argillieres

Harvested September 22 – before he began picking in Rully – Dureuil's 2006 Nuits-St.-Georges Clos Des Argillieres smells pungently smoky and of ripe, lightly stewed red fruits and rhubarb. The faintly game-like meatiness and salty, chalky, stony underpinnings here are typical for this wine, with this year's palpably dense rendition harboring a wealth of tenacious if fine-grained tannin. Toasted pralines and a hint of caramel contrast a bit jarringly with the tartness of fruit for now, but a deep finishing savor holds this together and holds tannins a bay in the long finish. I anticipate considerable additional complexity to emerge, and there is no lack of structure, but I would keep tabs on this wine over the next 6-8 years lest the tannins begin to become questionably assertive. Vincent Dureuil (for more about whom, see my report in issue 170) has again demonstrated his enormous talents in a vintage whose challenges were magnified in the commune of Rully by severe summer hail. Furthermore, rot was exacerbated throughout the Cote Chalonnaise, so the Dureuil's triage had to be especially severe (employing both a passive and a vibratory table); extraction very gentle (with no pigeage); and many wines racked off of their lees sooner than usual. Dureuil elected to filter some of them (a procedure he usually feels confident to avoid). A Peter Vezan Selection (various importers), Paris; fax 011 33 1 42 55 42 93