1999 Volnay Les Taillepieds 1er Cr

The 20th century went out with a bang for red Burgundy lovers, with the 1999 vintage producing copious quantities of excellent to outstanding wine.

From the outset, the 1999 red Burgundies offered a rare combination of charm and power. Most of the better wines were balanced and alluring from the start, but they are evolving very slowly and still have plenty of life ahead of them. While many of the ‘99s I sampled with the producers this winter have gone through sullen stages in bottle, most of them have launched into their periods of peak drinkability. If you own these wines – and especially if you chose wisely at the outset – you will be amply rewarded.

Etienne de Montille was forthright about the difficulties on the Cote de Beaune in 2000. "We had the worst of the weather all summer long, not just in September," he admitted. "We started harvesting on Saturday the 16th, with more problems with dilution than rot. But rot in 2000 was hard to detect, as it was inside the grapes rather than merely on the skins. Luckily, we had purchased a new sorting table prior to the harvest, and we eliminated 25% of our grapes." With most of the affected fruit discarded, the domain was able to ferment with a higher percentage of whole berries. De Montille did a shorter fermentation, with minimal chaptalization (the wines are now only about 12.2% alcohol). He did less punching down of the cap than normal in an attempt "to retain fruit and ripe tannins." Still, this will not be a strong vintage for this property. The de Montille '99s, on the other hand, are sensational: Etienne describes the vintage as "the best for us since 1959 in terms of elegance and completeness."

If one domain has benefitted from the recent string of warm growing seasons, it the Domaine de Montille, which has traditionally been averse to adding sugar to its musts, even at the risk of bottling wines with alcohol in the low 12.0% to 12.5% range. (In the past, this has frequently made these wines appear lean and austere in early tastings next to beefier examples of Burgundy, but more often than not it was the de Montille wines that impressed with their purity and flavor intensity 12 to 20 years later while the oversugared wines had collapsed.) In the last few warm vintages, grape sugars have been high and chaptalization has been minimal or totally unnecessary. Etienne de Montille, who is now in charge of winemaking, told me he occasionally chaptalizes barely 0.2%, "just to allow for evaporation of alcohol." At his spacious new aging facility in Beaune, the wines are racked only when needed, and a relatively low percentage of new wood (typically around 20%) is used for the crus. Bottling takes place on the late side (between May and August of 2000 for the '98 crus). On my November visit, both the '99s and '98s showed spectacularly.