The Ambroise 2008 Nuits St.-Georges leads with cassis and blackberry allied to sweet, smoky evocations of machine oil as well as espresso, cocoa powder, and toasted pecan. Bittersweet and almost thickly-concentrated, this shows a lot of both fine-grained tannin and toasty new wood (50% of which was new here); the finishing, too, being more formidable than loveable and with rather unyielding density. What there is of vintage-typical brightness comes off as rather detached. Perhaps a few years in bottle will stimulate it to loosen-up and harmonize, and I’ve no doubt it will remain in good health for the better part of a decade. Bertrand Ambroise picked late and captured impressively ripe material in 2008, though the strident side of the vintage is sometimes still in evidence in the resultant wines, and not always comfortably married with the ambitious extraction and high quotient of new wood that characterize his regimen. (For further details concerning Ambroise’s methods, consult my report in issue 171.) I did not, regrettably, have chance to taste any of Ambroise’s 2007s, which he characterizes, predictably, as having been much more open early-on than his 2008s and as for the most part being ideal to drink young.Importer: Robert Kacher Selections, Washington, DC; tel. (202) 832-9083