2008 Vosne Romanee Beaumonts

There is unfortunately only one (new) barrique of Tremblay’s 2008 Vosne Romanee Beaumonts (though there’ll be two and a half of 2009), and it continues the exploration of dark places by high-elevation Pinot that was glimpsed with her 2008 from neighboring Rouge du Dessus. As Tremblay points out, here the same hillside turns from east-facing to south-facing, but the extra ripeness, one result of which is less distinctively mineral-like flavors. Beet root and blackberry; noble mushrooms and roasting pan scrapings; peat and blond tobacco inform the nose and palate of a wine that spells “umami” with a capital “U” (stands for “underbrush,” too). There is a remarkable alliance of sheer viscosity – resembling a liqueur-like concentration minus the superficial sweetness – with brightness and fine tannin suffusion. Ginger and cardamom pungency add to the allure of a long, saliva-inducing finish that made my mandible heavy. If lucky enough to score multiple (heck, any!) bottles of this, plan on following this for a dozen or more years. Cecile Tremblay scored some of the most consistent successes of any Cote d’Or Pinot domaine with her 2008 collection and those from among her 2007 bottlings that I was able to sample included a couple of wines exceptionally impressive for that vintage. Tremblay blames irregular flowering and correspondingly disparate ripeness rather than any rot for the 25% of her 2008 fruit that she says was discarded on the sorting table, but pronounces herself “quite content” with the results, a judgment I can only characterize as exhibiting a ridiculous degree of restraint! (And while she didn’t mention it and I didn’t ask to taste it, I saw a lot of 2008 Bourgogne Rose lying around in bins at Tremblay’s temporary cellar quarters in Gevrey.) To convey an idea of the concentration of raw material with which she was working, Tremblay noted that most of her fermentative lots were give only a single pigeage … that’s not per day, but in total. Anywhere from one- to two-thirds of whole clusters with stems were included in the ferments, with the most striking wines tending toward the higher end. The 2008s here (save for three noted) were still in barrels (form which I sampled representatives) when I last tasted, and were due to have been bottled in late spring. Incidentally, Tremblay recovered more of her family’s properties with the 2009 vintage, which also yielded a bumper crop per vine of irresistible ripeness and what appear to be for the vintage unusual depth and verve, so any wine lovers have trouble scoring some bottles of 2008s might get their chance from 2009 despite the hype already surrounding that vintage. Importer: Weygandt-Metzler, Unionville, PA; tel. (610) 486-0800