1996 Gevrey-Chambertin Petite Chapelle 1er Cru

The other Dugat has slowly but steadily been adding to his small domain. He has also improved his winemaking in the past few years: Bernard '96s were singled out for praise by his colleagues on the northern Cote de Nuits several times on my November tour. Whereas Dugat's wines of the early '90s tended to be muscular and sometimes unyielding, even when admirably concentrated, today's bottles show more pliant textures and tannins. The extraction is now done with a lighter hand, and the tannins of the '96s are particularly smooth. This vintage brought grape sugars as much as a full degree higher than those of '95, says Dugat, and the ripeness of the skins shows. The quality of the fruit also enabled Dugat to use a higher percentage of whole berries. Dugat describes '95 as higher in acidity than '93, with somewhat less ripe skins than the earlier year. Dugat now does all the bottling himself, and expects to bottle the '96s without fining or filtration (he previously fined and filtered most of his wine, although the cuvees sent to America were not filtered). Dugat, who prunes for a low crop, is against the idea of saignee believing that wines concentrated in this manner will reveal themselves to be unbalanced after five or six years of bottle aging. Nor does he believe in cold maceration, which he feels sacrifices ageability to early showiness.