1999 Nuits Saint-Georges Les Chênes Carteaux 1er Cru

Dominique Laurent told me that he planned to bottle his '99 reds before the heat of their second summer in barrel (in past years, a number of grand crus have been bottled up to 26 months after the harvest). On my annual visit, he also emphasized that his suppliers are vinifying more gently than ever before, avoiding subjecting the must to any temperature shocks at the beginning, and decuving quickly as soon as the sugars have been fermented. The objective, as Laurent has pointed out in the past, is to prevent the wine genetic material from being irretrievably garbled or lost during vinification; Laurent's critics argue that this is likely to occur during his levage but I continue to find his best bottles to be among the sexiest wines produced in Burgundy. I did not taste all of Laurent's '99 cuvees but I sampled more than enough to see that he has had one of his best vintages to date. Incidentally, Laurent has established a small cooperage operation of his own. He selects top-quality Troncais oak and cuts the staves an extra-thick 40 millimeters (a normal Burgundy barrel is just 27 millimeters). This gives the wines a liqueur-like sweetness without any heavyhanded oakiness, Laurent maintains, as well as sweeter tannins; I'd have to say that my tasting of his '99s bore out this description. As in the past, most of Laurent's grand crus, and several of his premier crus, were aged in 200% new oak (that is, at the first racking, they were moved from one new barrel into another new one).

Yields here ranged between 38 and 45 hectoliters per hectare in '99, quite reasonable in the context of this copious vintage. "We benefit from a good percentage of older vines, which are never enormously productive," noted Christian Gouges, who describes 1999 as "a very pinot year. The wines have a good acid/tannin balance, lovely phenolic material and very deep pinot color, and good ripeness at a moderate sugar level. They've been good since the start and will probably always taste good. Nature can give this combination of production and high quality only once every 30 years. The rains were perfectly timed, and really helped to ripen the skins," Gouges noted. "The grapes had thick skins, a real carapace," he added, noting that he was "tres cool" with the vinification, doing a short cold soak and keeping total cuvaison to about 14 days. These wines are now consistently among the standouts of Nuits-Saint-Georges, and are particularly successful in both '98 and '99. (Vineyard Brands, Birmingham, AL)

Most of the 12 hectares of vines Jean-Marc Bouley works are through rental arrangements; he owns just three hectares of vines (in Pommard Pezerolles and Volnay Roncerets), most of which he replanted in the early '90s. Bouley describes the '99s as "very well balanced wines, structured but not too hard." The harvest was split in two by rain, he said, with the later-picked fruit showing some signs of dilution. Most of the '99s were racked prior to the 2000 harvest, some for the second time. Bouley was still recovering from an operation to repair herniated disks in his back, and still couldn't taste properly due to the pain relievers he was taking. He told me he hurt himself during the 2000 harvest, then managed to hobble through the vinification before undergoing surgery. (Represented by Russell Herman, Berkeley Heights, NJ; importers include V.O.S. Selections, Inc., New York, NJ)