Scented with mushroom and fresh ripe cherry, Pethel’s 2007 Volnay Les Pitures – from the small, unjustly-obscure site immediately north of d’Angerville’s Clos des Ducs – offers a lovely combination of creamy texture with bright fruit transparent to myriad fungal, forest floor, and saline, chalky mineral nuances. Nearly as refined, winsome, and promising as its 2006 counterpart, I would count on this for at least 8-10 years of fascination. Asked which of the vintages was more challenging, North Carolina ex-pat Blair Pethel just laughs at first and then says: “I lost more fruit to the tri in ‘07 than I did in ‘08. We had to rush in ‘07 because fruit was rotting on the vines. In ‘08, after the north wind came up and the sun came out, you could wait, and the rot dried out.” I tasted the ‘08s here already at the end of February, just before they were assembled into tank for an expected May bottling. They had lost a bit of color to recent sulfuring, which I suspect had also slightly depressed their fruit, hopefully only temporarily. (In 2009, Pethel practiced an incremental regimen of sulfuring instead.) For more details on his operation – which is a “domaine” only by trademark, as he contracts for most of his fruit – please consult issue 180, where I first reported on the whites, which are show-stoppers in 2008, incidentally, just as they were in 2007. A Becky Wasserman Selection (various importers), Le Serbet; fax 011- 333-80-24-29-70; also imported by Pas Mal Selections, New York, NY; tel. (201) 567 2028 and Schneider’s of Capital Hill, Washington, DC tel. (202) 543 9300

This is a wine built on its minerality from stem to stern and it's also one stunningly elegant wine with an extremely pure red berry fruit nose nuanced by an intense stoniness that continues on the admirably precise, intense and delicious middle weight flavors that are, stylistically speaking, much like the Blanches Fleurs in that there is a tremendous punch packed into a barely medium weight package, all wrapped in a wonderfully long and moderately austere finish (which is by the way spot on picture perfect young Pitures). Terrific.