1999 Nuits-Saint-Georges Les Pruliers 1er Cru

The 20th century went out with a bang for red Burgundy lovers, with the 1999 vintage producing copious quantities of excellent to outstanding wine.

From the outset, the 1999 red Burgundies offered a rare combination of charm and power. Most of the better wines were balanced and alluring from the start, but they are evolving very slowly and still have plenty of life ahead of them. While many of the ‘99s I sampled with the producers this winter have gone through sullen stages in bottle, most of them have launched into their periods of peak drinkability. If you own these wines – and especially if you chose wisely at the outset – you will be amply rewarded.

Vincent and Philippe Lecheneaut did two sortings of the fruit in 2000, a severe one in the vines and another on a table de trie "We had a lot of warm and humid weather," said Vincent. "The grapes were ripe and starting to fall off the vines, so we had to be vigilant about rot, especially in Chambolle-Musigny. But in a difficult year like 2000, when you do the work and it pays off, it that much more satisfying." The Lecheneauts have been doing less frequent, and gentler, pigeages since 1999, and today's wines are more aromatically perfumed without any obvious loss of structure. (Robert Kacher Selections, Washington, D.C.)

In search of more supple wines, the Lecheneaut brothers now do more punching down of the cap at the beginning of the fermentation and less toward the end, and the pigeage is slower, too. Since '96, they have also used a destemmer that doesn't crush the fruit. The Lecheneauts bled off 10% to 15% of the juice in their village wines following the '99 harvest, except for the Vosne-Romanee, whose normally stronger tannins would be exaggerated by this approach. The '99 will only be racked prior to bottling; in contrast, the '98s showed a stronger tendency toward reduction and needed to be racked in before the '99 harvest. These wines are better today than ever before. (Robert Kacher Selections, Washington, D.C.)