2004 Vosne-Romanée

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)