From 50 year old vines, Glantenay’s 2008 Volnay Brouillards offers distilled strength and palate-staining expressions of ripe cassis and blackberry – much as does the corresponding Santenots – but backs them up with strikingly pure and persistent fruit juiciness and fine-grained, well-integrated tannins, while incorporating a complex array of floral, mineral, and animal shadings suggesting iris, peat, forest undergrowth, iodine, chalk, and beef marrow. This should be worth following for at least 10-12 years and grow in interest. Young Thierry Glantenay – whom I met for the first time this March – has the luck to have inherited old vines acquired or planted by his grandfather in some of the most prestigious sites of Volnay, Pommard, and Puligny, and is applying to them evident care and intelligence, given which facts it isn’t surprising – even though it was news to me – that his cellar is a superb source of Burgundy. Glantenay’s finished 2008s are in the low-13s of alcoholic percentage, having for the most part been boosted by one-half to one degree. All of them were in tank when I tasted, and none were due to be filtered at bottling, although the village Volnay, Caillerets, and Rugiens had been lightly “pre-filtered” to deal with what Glantenay deemed excess turbidity.Importer: Weygandt-Metzler, Unionville , PA; tel. (610) 486-0800