2000 Chambertin Grand Cru

Like other Burgundy vignerons who work organically, Jean-Louis Trapet bottles wines that are still alive in a literal sense and thus can truly showcase the soil they're made from. But for this taster at least, the Trapet wines come across as fresher in their youth than most wines made this way. Trapet is fond of saying that he's doing less work in the cellar as his grapes get better. As a rule, he's moving toward gentler extraction: shorter macerations and less frequent pigeages Trapet's 2000s spent 21 to 23 days on their skins, and his 2001s just 17 or 18. Like many of his colleagues on the Cote de Nuits, Trapet told me that grape sugars were adequate but not particularly high in 2001. Vintage 2000 was rich in sugar, and the wines have fine tannins, but there's a confit character to the fruit, and the tannins seem almost a bit burnt," he went on. The 2001 have more sappiness, and the tannins are denser." (A Patrick Lesec Selection; importers include The Stacole Company, Boca Raton, FL and Classic Wine Imports, Boston, MA)

In 2000, for the first time, Jean-Louis Trapet used a table de trie with holes in it to enable the excess water to drain off the fruit. He has also been picking with smaller baskets since '99, which results in less breakage of grape skins and therefore less incipient oxidation. Trapet punched down more gently to privilege purity of fruit and minerality over sheer concentration in 2000. (A Patrick Lesec Selection; importers include The Stacole Company, Boca Raton, FL; Classic Wine Imports, Boston, MA; T. Edwards Wines, New York, NY; and Fine Vines, Maywood, IL)