Aromas of cooked mulberry and blackberry on the nose of Ambroise's 2006 Echezeaux presage its dark, stew-like palate whose formidable tannins quickly rise to the surface. This lacks the fresh fruit element and vivacity that rescue other of the wines in this collection from becoming too somber or even leaden. Certainly, though, it grips impressively. The use of standard barriques here rather than 400-liter barrels doubtless contributes to the enhancement of tanninity, and in fact Ambroise agrees this wine offers something of a negative illustration of the advantage in employing the larger size. The choice here was constrained because he owes half of the roughly 1,000 liters back to the owner of the parcel. This is all potential rather than fun right now. Still, I might have been intimidated (by the wine, not its author!) into scoring it as generously as I have, and I can only recommend revisiting in 2011 to assess its longer-term prospects.
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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