2008 Puligny-Montrachet La Garenne 1er Cru

I tasted this year with Gerard Boudot's assistant Bernard Riffault, who described the 2009 harvest as similar to the conditions of 2005. "The grapes were yellow but not too exotic," Riffault explained. "There was a bit more juice in the grapes in '09 and very little sorting was needed, so we made the full crop." Today Boudot starts with more lees, presses stronger and longer and does no batonnage, according to Riffault. The wines are more reduced during elevage, and that may be why he told me he thought they were "a bit compact, with a cold calcaire quality" when we tasted together. I thought they showed more crunchiness than the 2005s, whose aromas show a warmer aspect. Riffault believes the estate's 2008s will be easy to drink young. "Some are in surmaturite, almost with a botrytis character," he told me. "It's not a taut vintage or a classic year for aging, but the wines have good acidity and should have decent cellaring potential." Riffault finds the 2008s to be a bit more viscous than the 2009s as a group, describing the latter vintage as more classic. (Vineyard Brands, Birmingham, AL)

"Both 2008 and 2007 were saved by ten days of good weather before the harvest," noted Gerard Boudot. He began harvesting in 2008 on September 23, bringing in fruit with 13% to 13.5% potential alcohol (higher than in 2007) and with "a bit of surmaturite." The harvest required a lot of work, he told me. "We needed to pick out the grey rot and keep the pinker grapes. It was a small crop, especially after the selection, but the crop level had actually been smaller than 2007 since the flowering." He did a stricter settling of the must in 2008-in contrast to 2007 and 2005, two very clean vintages that required almost no debourbage. Ultimately, Boudot describes the 2008s as "between 2007 and 2006 in style, with higher acidity than 2006 but less of an exotic character." And he noted that "there's no reason why the 2007s won't last a long time," telling me that he now uses 40 ppm SO2 for the bottling, as well as thicker corks and silicone rather than paraffin to facilitate cork extractability. As to earlier vintages, Boudot admitted that "there's a lot of premature oxidation in my 1999s, the 2000s are in good shape, and the 2001s won't last a long time." (Vineyard Brands, Birmingham, AL)