2006 La Forge de Tart 1er Cru

Lots rejected for the grand vin (this year representing around 12% of the crop) inform the 2006 Morey-St.-Denis 1er Cru La Forge de Tart, but practically none of the press wine – which is always aged separately – found its way back into either of this year's bottlings. This offers sweetly ripe black fruits with a distinct and detached aura of caramel and resin from oak, mingled on the palate with slightly gritty tannin. The finish is persistent but similarly somewhat disjointed, and I detect no intimation of future depth. I'm skeptical, too, about the pieces ever coming together, but the wine might have been having a bad day on our sole encounter, and it would in any case be worth revisiting this in 2010 or 2011 to assess its potential and test my intuitions. Incidentally, the paucity of fruit in 2003 and its uniformly high quality in 2005 resulted in no second wine being bottled from those years. Sylvain Pitiot – who compares 2006 results here with 2001 – only began picking the Clos de Tart on September 27, and then took five days for completion. He normally vinifies half a dozen different lots, adapting the fermentative regiment to the corresponding parcels (in consultation with soil authority Claude Bourguignon) and to the varying age of vines of this large monopole, and assembling the wine only after the personality and potential of the components has become clear. Importer: Boisset America, Sausalito, CA; tel. (415) 289-4500