The 2010 Bourgogne Rouge is a lovely, delicate wine laced with sweet red fruit, crushed flowers, tobacco and spices. The feminine, floral side of the vintage comes through nicely in a wine that is ideally suited for drinking over the next few years. Anticipated maturity: 2012-2018. Cecile Tremblay started harvesting on September 21. Like all of her colleagues, Tremblay suffered losses of 30-40% of her crop because of the weather conditions in 2010. Tremblay used 30% stems of the Echezeaux, but destemmed the fruit for all of her other wines as she didn’t feel the stems were fully ripe. As always, the approach to winemaking is pretty stripped down to the bare essentials. The wines age on their lees with no rackings until they are prepared for bottling. Lastly, nearly everything you read about Cecile Tremblay makes mention that she is the grand-niece of Henri Jayer. While that fact is interesting from a historical perspective and explains the source of her holdings, it doesn’t make her wines good or bad. Frankly, these wines don’t need to stand on anyone else’s reputation. They are exceptional in their own right. I also tasted the 2010 Vosne-Romanee Les Rouges du Dessus, a highly promising wine that was still finishing its malolactic fermentation in November 2011 and was therefore hard to read.Importer: Peter Weygandt, Unionville, PA; tel. (610) 486-0800

The 2009 Bourgogne Rouge is a pretty, soft wine laced with dried cherries and flowers. This sensual, supple Bourgogne shows gorgeous mid-palate density and a supple personality best suited to near-term enjoyment. There is no shortage of pleasure here. The Bourgogne is made from parcels in Vosne-Romanee and Chambolle-Musigny. Tasted from tank. Anticipated maturity: 2012-2017. Cecile Tremblay is one of Burgundy’s emerging young growers. I was very impressed with all of the wines I tasted. Tremblay farms four hectares of vineyards across eleven appellations. She favors lengthy macerations (the 2009s spent 30 days on the skins) with no chaptalization or acidification. The percentage of whole clusters varies from wine to wine and can reach 100% at the grand cru level. The wines stay on the lees with no racking until they are prepared for bottling. New oak ranges from 20% for the village wines to 70% for the Grand Crus. These are striking wines, but there is every reason to believe the best is yet to come from this small, high-quality domaine.Importer: Peter Weygandt, Unionville, PA; tel. (610) 486-0800

Entirely from the Croix Blanche vineyard in Vosne-Romanee (the 2009 will represent a blend with fruit from Chambolle), Tremblay’s 2008 Bourgogne – recently-bottled when I tasted it – displays deep color, ripe black fruit and a prominent salinity as well as marrow-like meatiness for its modest appellation. “A lot of tasters guess this to be Vosne Villages,” she remarks with no sense of haughtiness, and that’s easy to imagine! The vintage-typical cut and brightness of acidity are here allied to a palate-clinging sense of sheer fruit concentration, and the salinity and fresh fruit vivacity in a long finish makes for a mouth-watering prospect over the next 3-4 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