2007 Cornas Chaillot

"At their best the 2008s are highly aromatic and spicy, but they aren't wines that you want to wait on for too long," Thierry Allemand told me in November. He hadn't made a decision yet (as usual) about what, exactly, he'll bottle from this difficult vintage but he seemed to be leaning to making a single wine. "The '08s will be good to drink while you wait on the '05s, '06s and '07s but there's no way that they'll come close for complexity or concentration." Allemand noted that 2007 is looking a lot like 2004. "There's good energy and expression and the wines are well-balanced. In many ways they are classic and they'll be surprisingly long-lived because of that balance. People who are obsessed with power probably won't appreciate them, which is too bad for them." Those 2007s were bottled three days after I tasted them, on November 9.