1999 Morey-Saint-Denis en la Rue de Vergy

Having recently purchased the old Pernin-Rossin domain, Christophe Perrot-Minot now has 14 hectares of vines and can offer an impressive range of wines from the most important villages of the Cote de Nuits. Like a number of his colleagues who originally attracted attention to their wines by using extractive techniques in search of color and power, Perrot-Minot says he using less manipulation and less new oak today, relying instead on vineyard practices like green harvesting to get riper grapes earlier and preserve terroir character. He was able to start picking on the first day of the 2000 harvest, and he believes that this allowed him to avoid the heaviness and surmaturite that characterized the '97s. Perrot-Minot still does an extended cold maceration by chilling the entire cellar down to 52 or 53 degrees. He also believes in chaptalizing a little bit, even when potential alcohol levels in the grapes reach 13%, in order to prolong the fermentation and get more gras and complexity. The current set of wines from this cellar offers a lovely combination of sweetness, purity and texture.

The past couple of years have brought lots of new developments for the ambitious Christophe Perrot-Minot. In 2000, he purchased the sizable Pernin-Rossin domain in Nuits-Saint-Georges. He vinified some of these grapes in 2000, including the Nuits-Saint-Georges Richemone and Vosne-Romanee Champs-Perdrix, while selling off the rest. Perrot-Minot recently constructed a new cave as well as additional space for storing bottled wines. There is also a new temperature-controlled vinification facility for the wines from the new domain. Perrot-Minot best '98s have turned out well. "The problem in general with '98 is the tannins," said Perrot-Minot. "By doing a green harvest, growers could get a bit more ripeness and avoid having green tannins. But there wasn't much margin for error." Still, he prefers the '99s for their balance and more fully ripe tannins. But he also noted that these latter wines seemed a bit more fragile during the vinification, and it has been necessary to keep a lot of carbonic gas with the wines during their levage (Represented by Russell Herman, Berkeley Heights, NJ; importers include V.O.S. Selections, Inc., New York, NJ)