2008 Bonnes-Mares Grand Cru

With each passing year Frederic Mugnier has let up on the reigns of winemaking and allowed the vintage to take center stage. His wines now reflect the unique qualities of each harvest to an exacting degree. Mugnier describes The 2009s as rich, powerful and exceptionally dense wines that will be at their most exciting in several decades' time, or – as Mugnier says with his typically dry sense of humor – when he's no longer around. The vintage was marked by one week of very hot weather towards the end of the growing season, although on average 2009 was not a hot year. The harvest began on September 10. For The 2009s Mugnier destemmed 100% of the fruit as he didn't feel he had the phenolic ripeness in the stems to use whole clusters. Fermentations lasted about three weeks, an approach which is now pretty much consistent from year to year. ‘Long, slow and gentle,' Mugnier says. The wines were racked once and were scheduled to be bottled between April and May 2011. The percentage of new oak barrels continues to drop and is now between 15-20% across the entire range. I also tasted all of The 2008s, a vintage in which Mugnier's wines are stratospheric for their sheer beauty, elegance and pedigree. In 2008 the harvest began on September 26, two full weeks after 2009, which is pretty consistent across domaines in these two years. Today The 2008s appear to have more finesse and silkiness. This will be a fascinating vintage to follow here.

Also recommended: 2008 Nuits-Saint-Georges Clos des Fourches.

Freddy Mugnier started picking on September 22 in 2008, with what he described as good sugar levels in the 12% to 12.5% range. He eliminated more rotten than green grapes and emphasized that "ripeness is no longer a problem in Burgundy." When he started in 1985, he explained, "a great vintage was when we could pick grapes at 11.5%, and even 11% was okay." Phenolic ripeness, of course, is another issue, and Mugnier told me he's more concerned with phenolic ripeness in dry years, when the juice can be riper than the skins. That's why he waited to harvest in 2009 and got very high sugars. "I would have been happy if I could have done a negative chaptalization in 2009," he told me. Incidentally, when I mentioned that many growers get higher sugars today partly due to lower crop levels, Mugnier noted that his own yields are not lower today than previously. In fact, he said, they were lower in the early '90s, when he used different farming methods.