2009 Chambolle-Musigny Les Amoureuses 1er Cru

Frederic Mugnier insists that his 2009s will outlive his 2010s. Tasting these 2009s from bottle, it hard to argue with that view.

With each passing year Frederic Mugnier has let up on the reigns of winemaking and allowed the vintage to take center stage. His wines now reflect the unique qualities of each harvest to an exacting degree. Mugnier describes The 2009s as rich, powerful and exceptionally dense wines that will be at their most exciting in several decades' time, or – as Mugnier says with his typically dry sense of humor – when he's no longer around. The vintage was marked by one week of very hot weather towards the end of the growing season, although on average 2009 was not a hot year. The harvest began on September 10. For The 2009s Mugnier destemmed 100% of the fruit as he didn't feel he had the phenolic ripeness in the stems to use whole clusters. Fermentations lasted about three weeks, an approach which is now pretty much consistent from year to year. ‘Long, slow and gentle,' Mugnier says. The wines were racked once and were scheduled to be bottled between April and May 2011. The percentage of new oak barrels continues to drop and is now between 15-20% across the entire range. I also tasted all of The 2008s, a vintage in which Mugnier's wines are stratospheric for their sheer beauty, elegance and pedigree. In 2008 the harvest began on September 26, two full weeks after 2009, which is pretty consistent across domaines in these two years. Today The 2008s appear to have more finesse and silkiness. This will be a fascinating vintage to follow here.

For many years, Freddy Mugnier would adapt his vinification and elevage to the style of each new vintage; in fact, it might be accurate to say that he often vinified against the style of the year). But this veteran winemaker has clearly had a change of heart. "Now I use the same vinification every year because I want to allow the character of each vintage to come through," he told me. For Mugnier the character of 2009 was largely determined by a very hot week in the second half of August, even though the summer as a whole was temperate. "This period of heat burned off a lot of the malic acidity and was responsible for quick ripening of the grape sugars," he told me; ultimately, alcohol levels in the 2009s are a full degree higher than usual. "The vintage lacks real tension; it's very much a modern style," he said, adding that if he could have changed something in 2009, he would have done less green harvesting. "Slightly heavier crop loads would have slowed down the ripening," he explained. "That would have been a good thing because the wines are a bit heavy." Mugnier destemmed all of his fruit in 2009, as he has done since 1992. He told me he wasn't tempted to experiment with stems in 2009 because there wasn't enough phenolic ripeness.