Savory sirloin juices are suggested on the nose and palate of the Tremblay 2008 Chapelle-Chambertin (tasted from bottle) to an extent that makes you shake your head wondering how such a thing could come from grapes. (We’re talking here about especially tiny berries and millerandage-riddled clusters, as is the case every year from these ancient vines.) That said, plenty of ripe cassis, dark cherry, and licorice is present to compliment this wine’s remarkably vivid carnal side. Dense, fine-grained tannin allied to energetic intensity of fresh fruit suggest the rippling of well-developed muscles in a torso that some (including me) would say is inherently testosterone-laden as a matter of terroir. Expect at least 12-15 years of vigor, but don’t look for charm. While few could enjoy the combination of expendable income and luck it would require, a comparison of this Chapelle with that of Claude Dugat will make for a startling combination of truth-in-terroir with stark stylistic divergence. Cecile Tremblay scored some of the most consistent successes of any Cote d’Or Pinot domaine with her 2008 collection and those from among her 2007 bottlings that I was able to sample included a couple of wines exceptionally impressive for that vintage. Tremblay blames irregular flowering and correspondingly disparate ripeness rather than any rot for the 25% of her 2008 fruit that she says was discarded on the sorting table, but pronounces herself “quite content” with the results, a judgment I can only characterize as exhibiting a ridiculous degree of restraint! (And while she didn’t mention it and I didn’t ask to taste it, I saw a lot of 2008 Bourgogne Rose lying around in bins at Tremblay’s temporary cellar quarters in Gevrey.) To convey an idea of the concentration of raw material with which she was working, Tremblay noted that most of her fermentative lots were give only a single pigeage … that’s not per day, but in total. Anywhere from one- to two-thirds of whole clusters with stems were included in the ferments, with the most striking wines tending toward the higher end. The 2008s here (save for three noted) were still in barrels (form which I sampled representatives) when I last tasted, and were due to have been bottled in late spring. Incidentally, Tremblay recovered more of her family’s properties with the 2009 vintage, which also yielded a bumper crop per vine of irresistible ripeness and what appear to be for the vintage unusual depth and verve, so any wine lovers have trouble scoring some bottles of 2008s might get their chance from 2009 despite the hype already surrounding that vintage.Importer: Weygandt-Metzler, Unionville, PA; tel. (610) 486-0800

Aromas of orange rind, red berries, wild plums, raw cocoa, rose petals and sweet spices introduce Tremblay's 2008 Chapelle-Chambertin Grand Cru, a wine that was harvested late, on 1 October. Medium to full-bodied, ample and fleshy, it's denser and richer than the supple, seamless 2007 but more tightly wound and reserved, with a tauter, less immediate profile that will reward further bottle age. Levels of malic acidity were especially high this year, and the wines were slow to evolve in barrel and in bottle.