2008 Domaine Henri Boillot Pommard Les Rugiens 1er Cru

From a newly acquired vineyard and 25 year-old vines, Boillot’s 2008 Pommard Rugiens Les Hauts mingles fresh blackberry and beef marrow, with peat, black tea, and black pepper segueing into a tactile impingement of spice, iron filings, and practically smarting smokiness. This grips and invigorates, its fine-grained but quite noticeable tannin only heightening the effect. I would expect it to be more profound in 4-6 years and to be worth pursuing for 15 or more years in all. In 2008, Henri Boillot both expanded his domaine and became ambitious qua negociant with Pinot. In the latter capacity, he looks for contracts where he can exercise control over the farming, so that, for example, all of the 2008s – he reports – were cropped at less than 20 hectoliters per hectare and picked very late. Unorthodoxly (for Burgundy, at least) Boillot pressed many of his reds early to let them complete fermentation in barrel. His malos were late but not dramatically so, finishing in August, and most of the wines were bottled in February, a few earlier. (I tasted several 2007 reds from Boillot, but too early-on to adequately assess, and I have not had time to revisit that collection.) Various importers