2007 Gevrey-Chambertin Vieilles Vignes

The soil was always humid during the 2008 growing season, said Sylvie Esmonin, and the grapes swelled during the cold, rainy August. (She even had some large grape clusters in her Clos Saint-Jacques vines even though she dropped a lot of fruit at the beginning of September, but this less-ripe material went into her Bourgogne.) Because her vineyards hadn't really suffered from any maladies in 2008 she didn't feel the need to pull leaves on the north side of the vines. "This was my regret in 2008, because I would have gotten more maturity," she said. Rot was a minor issue, but Esmonin told me she tossed out about 12% of her pink and large grapes. "My fruit in 2008 was fragile and not sweet enough. Even the peaches and the apricots in the south of France didn't have enough flavor in 2008." Esmonin told me that it was necessary to vinify with at least 30% whole clusters to make wines with terroir character, but the wines did not have the tannic structure to support as high a percentage of stems as she has used in recent years. The 2008s, she told me, are more vertical and longer than the 2007s; the earlier vintage is more horizontal and mouthfilling. I tasted the 2008s from tank. (Louis/Dressner Selections, New York, NY) Also recommended: Cote de Nuits-Villages (85).

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.