Plum and cherry mingle with beef bouillon in Gilles Jayer’s 2007 Nuits-St.-Georges Hauts Poirets, whose ripe fruit preserves an invigoratingly saline edge and is suffused on a finely-textured palate with saliva-inducing salinity; bitter sweet inner-mouth florality; as well as fruit pit and chalk notes that lend a slightly austere note to the long and otherwise mouthwatering finish. This is another instance in its collection of an atypically energetic and potentially long-lived 2007 which I would consider following for ten or a dozen years. Gilles Jayer did not commence harvesting is 2008 Pinots until October 1, with his Echezeaux. (In 2007, he began August 31.) With the exception of a few top parcels, he notes, triage had to be more severe in 2007 (just as in 2006) than it was in 2008, when he estimates that only 3-5% of what arrived in the press house was rejected. These 2008s evolved very slowly, in many instances retaining gaseous memoirs of their malo-lactic fermentations through the winter of 2009-2010, and not only were none of them bottled until after I last tasted them, but the Cotes de Nuits-Villages was simply not ready to be assessed. Importer: Robert Kacher Selections, Washington, DC; tel. (202) 832-9083