2004 Chambertin Grand Cru

David Croix described 2005 as "a great year, definitely my best yet, even if the young wines are a bit austere in nature." Only the fruit from sites affected by drought required a bit of chaptalization. Everything went easily, Croix added, and the malos finished fairly quickly, with most of the wines through by late winter. Croix did four or five punchdowns per day at the beginning of the fermentation, then almost none toward the end. He kept fermentation temperatures from exceeding 32oC because he was afraid of getting harsh tannins. In fact, he told me that although he's convinced that 2005 is a great and opulent vintage, he hasn't tried to make big, extractive wines. Camille Giroud purchased no new barrels for 2005, and the wines that I tasted were aging in roughly 10% new oak. Some were a bit tricky to taste as Croix was continuing to use the lees to keep the wines bright in barrel. (A Becky Wasserman selection; importers include Willette Wines, New York, NY and Veritas Imports, Beverly Hills, CA)

Young winemaker David Croix told me he looks for purity, not for extraction, and that one of the keys to ongoing improvement here is the quality of the house's relationships with suppliers. For his first vintage for the new owners (an investment group headed by Americans Joe Wender and Ann Colgin), most of the existing contracts with growers were kept, but a lot of changes were made for the 2003 vintage. And in 2004, he went on, the house kept "the best of 2003. ""We're working with our suppliers on the vine canopies in order to lower yields, and we're trying to get them to stop using herbicides. But this is the next level of a relationship with a grower. The most important thing is to get good ripe fruit," he summarized. Croix has a very gentle destemmer that does not crush or break the berries. For the 2004 vintage, following a four-day cold soak at about 15oC, Croix did a lot of punching down of the must at the beginning of the fermentations to get more fleshiness in the wines, then cut back drastically on pigeage as the sugars were converted to alcohol. "When you have concentration happening to underripe fruit, you have to be very careful about extraction," he explained. The 2004s were racked for the first time after the 2005 harvest. Interestingly, I began with some very promising Cote de Beaune wines, and these seemed more successful in their context than the Cote de Nuits wines that followed. (A Becky Wasserman selection; importers include Douglas Polaner Selections, Mt. Kisco, NY and Veritas Imports, Los Angeles, CA)