2008 Nuits St Georges Les Cras
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Tasting notes
The 2008 Nuits. St. Georges Les Cras is ageing beautifully and surpasses one’s expectations for a village cru. It has a lovely, open, generous bouquet with red currant and blackberry leaf that is nicely focused, offering bacon fat scents with continued aeration. The palate is medium-bodied with fine tannins. There is just a little hardness toward the finish and perhaps it does not quite possess the persistency of a premier cru, but it contains impressive mineralite and tension. I will be covering Louis-Michel’s highly praised; elusive and expensive wines in future issues of The Wine Advocate. But for now, in October I attended a fascinating tasting of older vintages to glean how they age. Certainly, these wines are imbued with a citrus freshness that verges of sorbet-like with some wines. They clearly go out to impress and impress they do. What these wines refuse to do is short-change the Burgundy-lover apropos perfume or flavor; they willingly go out there to satisfy the senses. They also appear to age slowly and gracefully, and I suspect most of these will reach their plateau after around a decade in the cellar.
Critic scores
Average Score
Neal Martin
Stephen Tanzer, Vinous
More reviews and scores
Good deep red with ruby highlights. High-toned, soil-inflected nose offers redcurrant, cherry, iron and leather, lifted by minerality. Then juicy, spicy and fresh in the mouth, with penetrating acidity giving cut to the taut, intense cherry flavor. This is balanced from the outset. Finishes long and fine, with substantial tongue-dusting tannins. Liger-Belair pointed out that this cuvee is always high in alcohol and acidity.
Good red-ruby. Very ripe, slightly roasted aromas of berries and chocolate. Large-scaled, creamy and liqueur-like; this very ripe wine really fills the mouth. Finishes with substantial dusty, chewy tannins. Very much a wine of the vintage. Liger-Belair noted that a week before he picked these grapes, the tannins were unripe.
(from 85-year-old vines that yielded just 23 hectoliters per hectare in 2008, according to Liger-Belair) Good deep red. Rich aromas of redcurrant, chocolate, minerals and musky tobacco. Creamy-sweet and deep; in a chewy, rather muscular style, with an old-viney cherry liqueur sweetness that's almost aggressive today. Very ripe but with a fairly low pH, according to Liger-Belair. Substantial tannins will enable this very rich wine to age a long time. A superb Cras.
About the producer
Since its rebirth in 2000, Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair has quickly become one of the most highly sought-after producers in Vosne-Romanée. The most prized wine from the estate is their monopole Grand Cru La Romanée.