2006 Volnay Taillepieds

Medium red. Perfumed nose offers medicinal red and black cherry, flowers and spices. Broad but a bit brooding on the palate, although aeration brought a sweeter, lusher texture, with an element of white pepper providing lift. Finishes with dusty tannins, a note of sweet oak and a lovely light touch. There's a tactile quality and a saline character here, as well as a slight rusticity to the tannins that Guillaume d'Angerville says is true to the terroir "I always have the image of an old man sitting on a wall," he explained. Quite reserved today but with plenty of chewy depth.

Good dark red. Ripe, deep nose offers black raspberry and chocolate. Impressively deep for the year but with lovely cut and vinosity highlighting the wine's layers of flavor. A step up in texture and length over the Mitans and Fremiet. The wine's youthful austerity suggests it will evolve slowly, but the granular tannins are plenty ripe. (The Cailleret was too reduced to assess in November.)

The d'Angerville 2006 Volnay Taillepieds tastes entirely consistent with the top-notch 2006 performances of this site in other hands. A lovely nose ripe black fruits, walnut oil, dark chocolate, and bitter-sweet floral perfume in the nose put me slightly in mind of a really ripe Cabernet Franc. Palpably dense on the palate – its palate-staining black fruits accented with bitter fruit pit, crushed stone, dark chocolate, and peat – this nonetheless preserves a fine sense of vivacity and lift that carries into a pungently-persistent, chalk-, peat-, and white pepper-dominated finish. This rich yet firmly structure, low-toned yet refreshing Taillepieds promises further complexity and elegance for those who give it a few years of bottle age, and I suspect it will hold well for more than a decade. ||Like his illustrious father, Guillaume d’Angerville and estate director (and brother-in-law) Renaud de Villette have beaten the odds with their gentle art of winemaking (inter alia short maceration, no pigeage, promotion of late malo, low levels of new wood) in far more difficult vintages than 2006, so the generally high quality of their recent collection comes as no surprise. They waited until late September, and then brought in their entire crop in only five days. I have not had chance to taste the d'Angerville generic and village wines, nor their Champans it was bottled. Incidentally, this estate continues to routinely give its wines a course plaque filtration. Wine Advocate.December, 2009