2005 Chambolle Musigny Les Amoureuses

From the same grower as his Charmes, Gambal’s lone barrel of 2005 Chambolle-Musigny Les Amoureuses exudes ripe strawberry, peony, raw meat and chalk dust. Tart berry notes and white pepper on the palate threaten to be overwhelmed by the flavors of new wood. Is this just a phase that the wine will work through, as Gambal (predictably) predicts? Certainly there is plenty of fruit and meat in the finish. I just can’t taste enough of the wine for the wood right now. In the interest of full disclosure as well as history, I should note that Alex Gambal was a retail customer of mine during his days in Washington, DC real estate (probably amassing the proverbial large fortune prerequisite to making a small fortune in the wine business). I met him again when he was honing his French in the employ of Becky Wasserman, just before he entered the Lycee Viticole in Beaune at the improbable age of thirty-nine. It has been almost a decade now since Gambal began his negociant business. With a sophisticated, huge, gravity-fed, and historically-housed facility, increasingly high-quality and long-term grape contracts, gradual accumulation of his own vine acreage, and clearly adept assistance from wine maker Fabrice Laronze, Gambal is demonstrating impressive results with his 4-5,000 cases annually of both red and (60%) white. Several of his 2005 vintage reds had only just been bottled when I tasted. The others had been racked and assembled in tank for early two months, awaiting imminent bottling. Numerous importers. EURL Alex Gambal, Beaune; fax 011-33-3-80-22-21-66