Already on the nose of Ambroise's 2006 Nuits St.-Georges Clos Les Vaucrains, one senses that it is less about sweetness of fruit – although black raspberry and cassis have a distillate-like presence – than it is about smoky carnal and mineral elements, accompanied by pungent herbal notes. The meatiness and stoniness of flavors here – when taken together with the wine's viscosity, underlying density, impression of sinewy, slightly chewy tannic structure, and peppery finishing pungency – puts me in mind as much of Hermitage as of Burgundian Pinot. Suggestions of roasted nuts and coffee add further dark, faintly bitter shadings to this formidable, compactly-layered, brooding wine (remarkably similar to its 2005 counterpart) but at the same time an enhanced sense of ripe black fruits informs its long, tactilely gripping finish. Some tasters may find this too overbearing to harbor hope of its achieving elegance, but it is quite an achievement as is, and one I suspect will gain in complexity over the next several years and be worth following for a decade.
It came as no surprise that Bertrand Ambroise would strive for ripe, concentrated, structured Pinots even in 2006, but I was amazed at the degree to which he succeeded with an approach that by his own admission was little different from that he had taken with his 2005s. Ambroise played-down a hypothesis I had begun to develop that Nuits-St.-Georges was especially favored in 2006, and added that he experienced less variability in ripeness from one Cotes de Nuits vineyard to another than was to be the case in 2007. Triage in 2006, reports Ambroise, was minimal, and performed primarily on cull under-ripe, not rot-afflicted bunches and berries. He left the young wines on their lees as long as he felt able, in order to retain a sense of freshness and vivacity, he said, as much as to enhance what was already manifestly going to be an unusual amount of body and palpable density for the vintage. (For further details concerning Ambroise's general methodology, readers are referred to my report in issue 171. As in other instances, I have not noted distinguished in their formal descriptions between estate wines and those Ambroise farms on contract.)
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