Ambroise’s 2005 Cote de Nuits-Villages originates just below Mugnier’s Clos de la Marechale and the Clos de l’Arlot. Cooked blackberry and blackcurrant along with a gamey meatiness in the nose lead to a creamy, richly-fruited palate with salt and pencil lead mineral suggestions. The finish is powerful and persistently gamey as well as rather severe in its bitterness of fruit concentration.
Amboise characterized this year’s fruit as consisting of “perfect berries, solid and well-structured” from which he concluded it should all be de-stemmed and a cautious approach taken to extraction. But caution is relative. Bertrand Ambroise certainly vinifies with a fanatic dedication to quality, but also with no concessions to the faint of heart, and his formidably tannic 2005s will strike some tasters as hyper-concentrated and flirting with over-extraction. Perhaps a bit more refinement and differentiation might have been achieved with a less robust and woody approach? Ambroise works largely with 400-liter barrels in an effort to preserve fruit by diminishing the surface-to-volume ratio and thus the flavoring effects of new wood, but I cannot claim that I would have recognized that fact in the wines themselves.
Importer: Robert Kacher Selections, Washington, DC; tel. (202) 832-9083
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