2005 - Vosne-Romanee 1er Cru Les Chaumes, Arnoux-Lachaux

Deep red. Smoky red and black fruit aromas are complicated by licorice and minerals. Highly concentrated, sweet and deep, with a medicinal quality to its black fruit flavors. A wonderfully seamless wine with terrific pinot sap. Finishes with superb ripe, spreading tannins. Widespread millerandage here has yielded a wine with terrific volume, but there's nothing heavy about it.

The 2005 Vosne-Romanee Les Chaumes – representing a large strip Lachaux owns, all the way from Les Malconsorts down to the Clos de Reas – offers flowers, talcum, black cherry in the nose, a silky palate featuring lightly-cooked cherry with sweet vanillin and floral inner-mouth aromas, and a juicy, sweet, gliding-off of a finish. Also recommended: 2005 Bourgogne (85). Pascal Lachaux (the late Robert Arnoux’s son-in-law, who has been in charge here now for nearly two decades) had just bottled his 2005 collection – vinified in his superb, recently-completed, gravity-fed facilities – when I visited. Lachaux compares the proper watchword of the winemaker in a vintage with Pinot as healthy and naturally-concentrated as in 2005, to that of a chef confronted with a perfect piece of fish: restraint. That also describes the results he has achieved in bottle, although allowance should be made for the possibility that the expression of certain wines was restrained by their recent bottling. mporter: Rosenthal Wine Merchant, Pine Plains, NY; tel. (800) 910-1990.