2008 Vosne-Romanée Cuvée Duvault-Blochet 1er Cru

I tasted the 2008s in bottle in late June 2011 after having gone through the 2010s from barrel. Aubert de Villaine describes 2008 as a difficult vintage with a lot of rain. Botrytis was an issue and the vineyards required constant attention. On September 14th the weather changed dramatically. A steady north wine dried out the grapes and concentrated sugars quickly, which also reduced the size of the berries. A further selection of fruit lowered yields to an even greater extent, resulting in overall production that is as much 50% lower than normal for the Domaine. As for the wines, they are magnificent in my view, but will require considerable patience.

I was intrigued by the comments of cellarmaster Bernard Noblet on the relative merits of DRC's 2008s and 2007s. Noblet described the 2008 growing season as difficult and requiring a severe sorting of the fruit for both rotten and underripe grapes. "We literally did two harvests because the flowering had been so drawn out," he told me. Cool weather during the harvest generally resulted in a good ten days of cold soak before the fermentations began. Extraction was then difficult, according to Noblet. The wines were vinified with 60% to 80% whole clusters, and the team has kept a bit of the lees to fatten the wines, which Noblet told me needed more structure. Interestingly, he described the 2007s here as more classic and more typical, and more strict than the 2008s. (A year earlier, Aubert de Villaine had described the 2007s as ethereal wines, and a bit less classic and soil-inflected than the 2006s.) While I'm sure that these wines will enjoy a long life in bottle, a number of them were awfully sexy when I tasted them in November. Except where indicated, the 2008s, had been racked about ten days prior to my visit. Incidentally, DRC plans to make two wines in 2009 from their purchase of the grand cru vineyards of Domaine Prince Florent de Merode in late 2008. As crop levels were tiny in '09, there will be an old-vines cuvee and another bottling from the rest.