2005 Maison Alex Gambal Savigny-lès-Beaune Vieilles Vignes

From immediately east of the village itself, Gambal’s 2006 Savigny-les-Beaune offers aromas of tart strawberry and rhubarb, smoked meat, and pungent spice. Persistently invigorating and juicy on the palate, it displays a positively silky texture and a finish of cut and clarity that belie its recent bottling. This lithe, refined wine is long on delicacy and primed for short-term enjoyment although, given that it is a Savigny and a 2005, one suspects if would still perform well if forced to spend 3-5 years in a cellar. 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