1998 Saint-Drezery Cuvee Prestige

This 100-acre estate, whose vines are planted at an altitude of 700 meters outside the village of Saint-Drezery, looks a bit like Tuscany, with truffle oaks and olive trees on gently rolling hills. Owner Gerard Bru benefits from having one of the more modern vinification facilities in the Languedoc. His reds are made in large, temperature-controlled stainless steel tanks and oak uprights, while the whites are fermented and aged in new barriques; a good bit of new oak is used to age the reds. The first commercial release for Puech-Haut was 1994, from vines planted about 15 years earlier. The estate's various red components are aged on their lees and assembled the second winter after the harvest. Since the 1997 vintage, enologist Michel Rolland has consulted here; at Rolland's urging, the estate introduced leaf-pulling to get more sun on the fruit and has harvested later for maximum ripeness. The "Epicurien" bottlings shipped to the U.S. are the same wines as those labeled "Tete de Cuvee" for the local French and European markets. These are consistently deeply colored, fresh wines with lovely retention of fruit. Bru is high on his '99s (I thought the syrah components were especially impressive), a vintage he describes as "fruitier than the '98s. We did a longer maceration, with pigeage and delestage (a technique whereby the juice is drained from the tank, then poured back over the solids, which have been allowed to concentrate in a mass). It would have been hard to do this much extraction in '98 without drying the wines."