From 65-85 year old vines, the Boillot 2008 Pommard Les Croix Noires displays striking carnality and salinity, along with the sort of tart-edged yet ripely-concentrated dark berry fruit and deep intimations of forest floor one finds in most of the best wines of the present collection. This is penetratingly mouth-watering and clings with a remarkable amalgam of salt, chalk, brown spices, berry, piquant fruit pit, and raw meat. Give it a few years and anticipate its being worth following for at least a dozen. Boillot, gesturing toward his supply of magnums, offers a more generous prognosis: “twenty years”!
Louis Boillot’s 2008s – all but three recently racked to tank when I tasted them in February, and due to have been bottled between April and June depending in part on the sensory evolution of their prominent acidity – represent one of those vintage collections that reminds one of the virtues of typical wines from two or more decades ago: restrained, a bit youthfully tart and tight, but back by admirable extract and energy, and likely to reward cellaring for at least the better part of a decade. Having described this collection as something of a throwback, I must note that Boillot said by the time he finished picking on October 4 his remaining fruit was already at 13.5% potential alcohol – riper than in 2007 – and only a few 2008 vintage lots in his entire cellar were chaptalized. The vintage reminds him of 1996 in terms of its acidity, but of the long under-rated 1972s overall. “I bottled a lot of magnums in 2008,” Boillot says with a confident twinkle in his eye. Unfortunately, time constraints precluded by tasting the 2007s from this cellar.
Importer: Rosenthal Wine Merchant, Pine Plains, NY; tel. (800) 910-1990