2001 Pommard Les Epeneaux

The 2001 Pommard Clos des Epeneaux 1er Cru is showing better than the previous bottle I tasted. There's plenty of dark berry fruit on the nose with forest floor and incense touches. Supple tannins on the palate frame the pliant red fruit, lightly spiced and perhaps just missing the essence of Pinoté towards the finish. Otherwise, this is a perfectly decent Pommard that is just missing a bit of élan . Tasted at the Clos des Epeneaux vertical in London.

The 2001 Pommard 1er Cru Clos des Epéneaux feels fully mature; a bouquet with smudged red berry fruit laced with bay leaf and forest floor scents. It is attractive, although lacks the energy I expect. The palate is medium-bodied with grainy tannin, degraded red fruit that is ferrous in style, hints of Seville orange marmalade and a dash of white pepper on the finish. This was never my favourite era for this domaine, recent vintages demonstrating much more finesse and terroir expression. Tasted at Sarah Marsh’s 2000 and 2001 horizontal tasting.

The 2001 Pommard 1er Cru Clos des Epeneaux is entering its plateau of maturity, offering up a complex bouquet of dried cherry, espresso, orange rind and spice, framed by cedary new oak. On the palate, the wine is medium to full-bodied, revealing a good core of sweet, degraded fruit but also a rather firm and austere chassis of tannin that asserts itself on the grippy finish. While some might say, "that's just Pommard," it's the quality of the tannins rather than their abundance that concerns me, and as the wine is already quite tertiary, I wonder whether time is on its side. 2001 was still early days in Benjamin Leroux's tenure here, and this certainly seems appreciably more oaky and extracted than the wines he was making by the late-2000s.