2007 Chambolle-Musigny Premier Cru

The sun stayed out after September 10, noted Alain Meunier, but the temperatures remained cool through the end of the 2008 harvest. Concentration came via evaporation, not photosynthesis. "The grapes had a lot of skin and pulp but very little juice," he explained. "There was a concentration of tannins, color and acidity, but still some greenness in the skins and seeds. Between the underripe and rotten grapes, we threw out about 30% of our crop." Meunier told me the pHs were in the moderate 3.4 to 3.45 range, but that in the '08s the "acidity supports the pinot fruit; it's not hard." He did one pigeage per day "at most" and a shorter-than-usual fermentation. The malos finished here by July and the wines had been sulfited but not yet racked by the time of my November visit. Meunier compares his 2007s to his 2000s and 1992s.

"The 2007 growing season began with a hot April and a long flowering lasting almost three weeks," said Alain Meunier. "We found the same differences at harvest time, even within the same parcels, and we picked some of our parcels in passes. We actually started the harvest on August 28 and 29 in Nuits-Saint-Georges Boudots, Clos Vougeot and Cote de Nuits-Villages, then stopped for five or six days before picking again from September 5 through 8, and then again on September 11 and 12." Not surprisingly, Meunier told me he eliminated both rotten and underripe grapes. The Clos Vougeot and Boudots were not chaptalized, added Meunier, but some of the wines were chaptalized as much as 1.5 degrees. And the development of the wines in barrel was also irregular, as some of the malos here finished before Christmas but others occurred in May. Meunier describes the 2007s as having fat tannins and low acidity. Two thousand six yielded firmer wines here; with their lower pHs, they convey more flavor authority.