Deep roasted meat richness and confitured dark cherry and purple plum are tinged with vanilla, caramel, and brown spices from oak in the four barrels of Chauvenet’s 2008 Clos Vougeot. A high-toned aura of distilled fruit hangs over the performance here and there is a constrictive and faintly gum-numbing sense of tannin that strikes me as resulting from an unfortunate reinforcement of grape tannin by new wood. That said, the fruit essences here, too, are generously concentrated and the finish hands on for dear life. Possibly it’s just a question of wine lovers hanging on to their bottles for a few years while the tannins resolve themselves or begin to dissipate, but I would plan on revisiting this in 3-5 years before attempting to prognosticate about its longer-term potential. Hubert Chauvenet testified to normal malos (i.e. finishing in spring – the wines’ first spring that is!). He points to the bright red of his successful 2008s as witness to the health of the corresponding fruit, whereas the 2007s had by the same stage already taken on a hint of garnet, and he tends to agree with me that many 2007s – in which, naturally he did not include his own! – were at their most exuberant and expressive while still in cask. Vigilant canopy-management and aggressive fruit-dropping have long been constants here. Chauvenet’s cellar has now been arranged to permit delivery of his fruit to the fermentation vats via conveyor and to eliminate pumping, and the refinement of tannins and clarity of fruit I witnessed in the best of these 2008s – especially considering that their author still favors high levels of new wood – can almost surely be traced to those developments. And speaking of clarity, Chauvenet pointed out that several of his 2008s are on the edge of what he deems acceptable turbidity and unfortunately resisted naturally clarifying to any greater degree. But after due consideration, he decided to bottle, as usual, without filtration, a wise move I would guess, given how well these 2008s have turned out.Imported by Robert Kacher Selections, Washington, DC; tel. (202) 832 9083