2002 Pommard Les Pezerolles 1er Cru

Etienne de Montille started the 2003 harvest on August 22 with the family's Volnay vineyards, eliminating a lot of dried berries.The grapes were so hot that the juice was running out, so he quickly decided to bring refrigerated trucks into the vineyards to cool down the fruit.The refrigeration kept the grapes fresh, and allowed Montille to vinify with a high percentage of whole clusters, which did not generally begin to ferment for four or five days and which also slowed the pace of the fermentation.Montille cut the percentage of new oak to just 10% to 20%.The malolactics mostly finished between June and September, and virtually everything in the cellar had been sulfured the week prior to my visit.For each sample, Montille made a blend from a selection of different barrels.These 2003s are big, rich, very ripe wines with alcohol levels between 13.5% and 14%.They are not your father's Volnays-or Etienne's father's.

Etienne de Montille began our tasting with a few samples pulled from cuve in a cellar in Beaune.These wines were solid if unspectacular, and may have been suffering from the racking and sulfuring a month prior to my visit.But then we went into the family's barrel cellar in Volnay and I tasted some of the most spectacular Cote du Beaunes of the vintage-wines whose energy and grip in fact promise to transcend the vintage.The wines are distinctly higher in alcohol than the classic wines of this domain 20 years ago, but that just reflects an evolution of technique here. We look for aromatic purity, finesse and aging potential," Etienne told me. At the same time, we're trying to get rid of unnecessary austerity.We don't need to have consumers suffer for the first ten years of a wine's life.And we can't apply a vin de garde approach to every vintage."(Martin-Scott Wines, Lake Success, NY; Beaune Imports, Berkeley, CA; Chicago Brands, Chicago, IL; also represented by Europvin/Christopher Cannan Selections)