2009 Chambertin-Clos de Bèze Grand Cru

These wines from proprietor Mounir Saouma are impressive. Saouma sources small lots of wine from the best sites in Burgundy and does all of the post-alcoholic fermentation élévage in his cellar in Beaune. Saouma's approach calls for long, slow malos, extended contact on the gross lees and no fining or filtration prior to bottling. Saouma bottles an eye-popping 60 different wines, some sourced from more than one grower. Count me as a fervent believer in terroir. As much as I subscribe to the belief that specific plots of land can confer unique qualities to wines, the reality is that a variety of other factors are just as important, including the talent of the winemaker and the ambient qualities of the cellars in which wines are raised. What amazes me most about these wines – aside from the obviously very high quality – is that there is without question a distinctive house style that emerges across the range, despite the fact that they come from different sources and are acquired as wine rather than fruit. Saouma likes to describe his cellar as a library of Burgundy's finest terroirs. That's as good a description as any for these uniformly outstanding, compelling wines.

"I've been waiting for the vintage, and 2009 is it," said Mounir Saouma in mid-November. "We had a great vintage in 2002, and 2006, 2007 and 2008 were very good, but in 2009 we had the most beautiful grapes I've seen in 21 years." Mounir considers 2005 and 1999 to be too mediatique [essentially, overhyped by the media]: "I'm not a big fan of these vintages. Two thousand five had too much of everything. Two thousand nine is the opposite: not overly alcoholic, not overly tannic, not too high in acidity. The best wines have great harmony. It's a year when Burgundy is Chambolle-Musigny!" But Saouma stressed that there are two kinds of wine in 2009. "The defect to the vintage was that it was very warm just after the harvest. On October 10 we were wearing t-shirts. In many cellars the malos were finished before Christmas and the wines will be bottled early. These wines will be like most 1997s: good for 10 to 15 years. But when we brought our barrels to the cellar in the winter, we turned on the air-conditioning and our earliest malos didn't finish until June. So our wines were able to benefit from another six months of slowly digesting their lees. Assuming that this style of wine survives 18 to 24 months of elevage without being protected by too much sulfur, they'll remain fresh and we'll enjoy them every year for four decades."