Assembled from the domaine's premier cru holdings in Le Village and La Riotte – below the winery and on the other side of the village from the Clos – the Lambrays 2006 Morey-St.-Denis Les Loups shares with its stable mates a distinctly resinous tone I associate with the inclusion of stems, as well as a vibrant, sappy, long-lasting intensity of ripe, spice-tinged, tartly-edged plum, cherry, and blackberry. Here, an elusive but haunting floral perfume wafts alluringly throughout, and along with the resinous notes, a hint of tar, and the fruit's lashing to a firm raft of tannin put me in mind a bit of really top-notch old-fashioned Barolo. The leanness here will not appeal to all pinotphiles, to be sure. But the invigoration and finishing energy drive a lovely sense of interactive complexity. This would do well to be permitted 2-3 years of bottle rest, and should be worth following for the better part of a decade.
Thierry Brouin began harvesting ahead of the ban de vendange, yet felt that the stems were sufficiently ripe to retain, which – together with reliance on unbroken clusters – is his preferred means of controlling fermentative extraction. Brouin's haste, though, was also driven by a pressing concern. "We don't do any spraying against botrytis," he explains, "and in the beginning of September we had a lot of mild rain, and rot … whoosh! So we had to do a really strict selection and lost one-third of a normal yield." In light of Brouin's explanations, I was not expected what appeared in the glass: wines that easily more than stand qualitative comparison with his 2005s, and furthermore are a lot more fun to drink.
Importer: Weygandt-Metzler, Unionville, PA; tel. (610) 486-0800
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