2006 Côte de Nuits-Villages

Crop levels in 2007 were below 40 hectoliters per hectare, and of the wines I tasted only the Gevrey villages was chaptalized. Sylvie Esmonin describes her 2007s as "not small, but not heavy either; they're tender and fleshy. Right now we're not seeing the effects of bad conditions in June, July and August." Interestingly, she started picking in Gevrey on September 3 and harvested her vines in the Cote de Beaune afterwards, because the sugars came late farther south. The wines were cloudy and thus tricky to taste in November, as most of the barrels had been rolled ten days before my visit, but Sylvie preferred to show me these rather than barrels that had recently been racked and sulfured.