Tremblay’s three barrels of 2008 Echezeaux du Dessus (two new; all crafted by impressively artisan but increasingly fashionable tonnelier Stephane Chassin) enjoyed rather exotic provenance, the oak for one coming from Jupilles and another from the Foret de Blois near the Loire and the famous, once royal forests of Fontainebleau just south of Paris. I wouldn’t normally fixate on such issues, but I’m beginning to feel that it would be a mistake to discount anything that Cecile Tremblay considers important, let alone feels passionate about! Oh … right, the contents of said barrels (one of which was still gassy from the completion of malo!): a nose of smoky Lapsang tea, cassis, licorice, dark mushroom stock and forest floor leads to a firmly but finely tannic, almost sparklingly brightly-acidic palate impression. This is going to express its concentration with considerable finesse, I feel sure, and it finishes with already almost kaleidoscopic complexity as well as prodigious length. But its glacial pace of evolution makes getting an at all precise picture of its personality difficult, and I expect that after bottling (which was scheduled for June), too, it will be slow to develop, and almost certainly worth following for more than a dozen years. 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

Tremblay’s three barrels of 2008 Echezeaux du Dessus (two new; all crafted by impressively artisan but increasingly fashionable tonnelier Stephane Chassin) enjoyed rather exotic provenance, the oak for one coming from Jupilles and another from the Foret de Blois near the Loire and the famous, once royal forests of Fontainebleau just south of Paris. I wouldn’t normally fixate on such issues, but I’m beginning to feel that it would be a mistake to discount anything that Cecile Tremblay considers important, let alone feels passionate about! Oh … right, the contents of said barrels (one of which was still gassy from the completion of malo!): a nose of smoky Lapsang tea, cassis, licorice, dark mushroom stock and forest floor leads to a firmly but finely tannic, almost sparklingly brightly-acidic palate impression. This is going to express its concentration with considerable finesse, I feel sure, and it finishes with already almost kaleidoscopic complexity as well as prodigious length. But its glacial pace of evolution makes getting an at all precise picture of its personality difficult, and I expect that after bottling (which was scheduled for June), too, it will be slow to develop, and almost certainly worth following for more than a dozen years. 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