2005 Maison Alex Gambal Echezeaux

Gambal has three barrels (one new) – from vines planted in 1945 in the prime, “du Dessus”sector – of 2005 Echezeaux. Scents of candied raspberries and strawberries, horehound, and tar segue into a palate of intensely ripe berry fruit, raw meat, charred wood smokiness, and a glossy, glycerin-rich feel to help ameliorate its ample tannins. This rich, sultry (newly-bottled) wine preserves invigorating fresh fruit acids and possesses a firm, fine-grained structure, both typical of the vintage at its best. One can expect to wait a decade for this to fulfill its potential and justify its price. 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