2000 Nuits Saint-Georges Les Cailles 1er Cru

Bertrand Chevillon says the estate's yields were closer to 35 hectoliters per hectare than 40 in both 2001 and 2002. Cool harvest-time weather in 2001 made it easy for the Chevillons to carry out their normal week of pre-fermentation cold maceration. The malos finished in the spring of 2002, and the wines were racked between March and May; as always, the year-old wines were relatively easy to taste in November. According to Bertrand, the '01s generally began with 11.5% to 12% alcohol and were chaptalized to 13.5%; in 2002, he added, grape sugars reached 13.2%, the highest in a long time here.

By chance, I tasted at Chevillon this year directly after a visit at Gouges, and the differences between my two favorite Nuits-Saint-Georges domains were thrown into clear relief. The Chevillon wines, especially the 2000s, are more user-friendly in their youth; although these wines have track records for aging well, they do not generally display the early austerity of the Gouges wines. However, it occurred to me that in a vintage like 2000, the Chevillon wines should be bottled earlier than the second July, which is routinely the period for bottling at this domain, especially in light of the fact that the wines completed their malolactic fermentations by the end of February 2001. (Nowadays, relatively few Burgundy domains bottle their red wines more than 12 or 13 months after the secondary fermentations finish.)