2009 Moulin a Vent Clos de Londres

Ruby-red. Deeply pitched aromas of dark berries, cola and Indian spices, with a smoky mineral quality adding lift. Sappy and expansive on the palate, offering ripe blackberry and bitter cherry flavors lifted and braced by tangy acidity. Closes smooth, smoky and long, with supple tannins adding grip.

Representing a proportion of carbonic maceration and of tank elevage, the Chateau du Moulin-a-Vent 2009 Moulin-a-Vent mingles resin and brown spices with its ripe, dense black fruits while permitting a sense of marrowy underlying meatiness to emerge and add some depth to a satisfyingly persistent finish. There is a fine streak of tannin, and I would expect (speculative though this judgment is in lieu of a track record) that one will be entertained over the course of at least the next several years. (Material destined for the 2010 displayed a focus, vivacity, and fruit skin invigoration I found welcome even though some awkwardness to the oak component was discernable in a couple of potential barrel lots.) ||Jean-Jacques Parinet – along with his vineyard and cellar manager Guillaume Berthier, and commercial director Gilles Herr – is out to revive an estate whose 74 acres (and slightly more numerous parcels) arguably constitute collectively the largest single share of top acreage in the Moulin-a-Vent appellation, and to render wines that will be flatteringly compared with those the great Pinots of the Cote d’Or. I have some reservations as to whether the extent of fermentative extraction and wood exposure (or perhaps the choice of barrels) in these new wines from the ancient Chateau du Moulin-a-Vent will prove entirely or consistently beneficial, but only time can tell as they evolve in bottle. Certainly the 2009s – for which the new team was essentially entirely responsible, having taken over in March of that year – are impressive in their relatively opaque, sweetly-ripe, oak-inflected way; whereas the success of similar elevage and oak-integration in the lighter 2010 vintage remains to be seen. Fruit is rigorously sorted on two tables; the must and young wines moved via gravity; and lots are assembled from barrel relatively soon before bottling – which for the 2009s took place in summer of the following year – and any not making a stringent cut will be sold-off rather than chosen for that final blend. I could not yet give a useful account of the two largest eventual bottlings from 2010s, though I have appended a few comments on their components to my accounts of the corresponding 2009s.||There is, as yet, no U.S. importer for this estate. Wine Advocate.August, 2011