The 2010 Vosne-Romanee Les Beaumonts is seriously beautiful from start to finish. It presents a deep, intense color next to the rest of the 2010s. Hard candy, mint, flowers and licorice are some of the notes that flesh out the palate. The Beaumonts has that extra degree of fleshiness that is missing in some of the other village and premier cru level wines. There is a single 350-liter barrel of this wine. Even though the barrel was new, there is no hint of oak whatsoever. This is a brilliant effort from Cecile Tremblay. Anticipated maturity: 2016-2031. 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 Vosne-Romanee Les Beaumonts is a super-ripe, exotic beauty from one of the warmer microclimates in Vosne. This sensual, inviting wine caresses the palate with seamless layers of black fruit, showing plenty of depth, persistence and harmony. It is an inviting, rich Burgundy that captures the essence of this great vintage. Anticipated maturity: 2014-2029. 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

There is unfortunately only one (new) barrique of Tremblay’s 2008 Vosne Romanee Beaumonts (though there’ll be two and a half of 2009), and it continues the exploration of dark places by high-elevation Pinot that was glimpsed with her 2008 from neighboring Rouge du Dessus. As Tremblay points out, here the same hillside turns from east-facing to south-facing, but the extra ripeness, one result of which is less distinctively mineral-like flavors. Beet root and blackberry; noble mushrooms and roasting pan scrapings; peat and blond tobacco inform the nose and palate of a wine that spells “umami” with a capital “U” (stands for “underbrush,” too). There is a remarkable alliance of sheer viscosity – resembling a liqueur-like concentration minus the superficial sweetness – with brightness and fine tannin suffusion. Ginger and cardamom pungency add to the allure of a long, saliva-inducing finish that made my mandible heavy. If lucky enough to score multiple (heck, any!) bottles of this, plan on following this for a dozen or more 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