1999 Musigny

Dominique Laurent told me that he planned to bottle his '99 reds before the heat of their second summer in barrel (in past years, a number of grand crus have been bottled up to 26 months after the harvest). On my annual visit, he also emphasized that his suppliers are vinifying more gently than ever before, avoiding subjecting the must to any temperature shocks at the beginning, and decuving quickly as soon as the sugars have been fermented. The objective, as Laurent has pointed out in the past, is to prevent the wine genetic material from being irretrievably garbled or lost during vinification; Laurent's critics argue that this is likely to occur during his levage but I continue to find his best bottles to be among the sexiest wines produced in Burgundy. I did not taste all of Laurent's '99 cuvees but I sampled more than enough to see that he has had one of his best vintages to date. Incidentally, Laurent has established a small cooperage operation of his own. He selects top-quality Troncais oak and cuts the staves an extra-thick 40 millimeters (a normal Burgundy barrel is just 27 millimeters). This gives the wines a liqueur-like sweetness without any heavyhanded oakiness, Laurent maintains, as well as sweeter tannins; I'd have to say that my tasting of his '99s bore out this description. As in the past, most of Laurent's grand crus, and several of his premier crus, were aged in 200% new oak (that is, at the first racking, they were moved from one new barrel into another new one).