2005 Givry La Servoisine

From a site on the northern edge of town, and matured in around half new barrels, Joblot’s 2005 Givry Clos de la Servoisine displays an alluring nose of lightly-cooked plum, black raspberry, nutmeg, cinnamon and cocoa powder. Vibrant, sappy, and intensely-fruited in the mouth, with Cote-Rotie-like notes of bacon and smoke emerging, it finishes with concentration if relative tightness on notes of sappy black fruit, smoked meat, salt and wet stones. I suspect this will harden over the next year and ought then to be given 3-5 additional years to open back up. Jean-Marc Joblot says he is always seeking precisely what 2005 delivered – the best fruit of his thirty year career: concentrated, pure, its elements in equilibrium. He continues to rely on roto-fermentors and is unafraid of new wood. But the wines are not just well-concentrated. They are well-balanced and possessed of considerable refinement, once again proving that the best reds of the Cote Chalonaise deserve more serious attention than most Burgundy lovers or journalists accord them. Joblot was at pains to warn me that these wines were traumatized from recent bottling, although I can’t say I would have arrived at that conclusion from their performance. Importer: Robert Kacher Selections, Washington, DC; tel. (202) 832-9083