2008 - Clos Saint-Denis Grand Cru, Lucien Le Moine

Barrel #1: Good medium red. Knockout nose combines raspberry, rose petal, crushed stone, game, smoke and flint; an essence of this grand cru. Wonderfully silky on entry, then moderately sweet and very fine-grained, with considerable complexity to the flavors of briary berries, pepper, smoke and earth. Barrel #2: Bright, deep red. Very ripe, more liqueur-like aromas of raspberry and spices; more fruits and less earth here. Then hugely concentrated and sweet; at once more tactile and less noble than the last sample but with more obvious red fruit flavors and plenty of underlying stone. Similarly peppery on the long aftertaste. This is aging in a barrel that received a longer toasting.

Saouma and Brakir report that their two barrel lot of 2008 Clos St.-Denis was on very bad behavior throughout its first winter. But that certainly wasn’t the case when I tasted it in March! Nutmeg, iris, rare beef juices, blackberry, and red currant inform a memorable nose and silken-textured, sweetly- yet brightly-fruited, deeply carnal and savory palate. Suggestions of toasted pecan and of crushed stone add complexity to the resonant finish. And given how far this has evidently come and how quickly, who knows whether I am understating its claim to greatness and to a quarter century of cellar potential? In 2008, maintained Mounir Saouma, growers had to decide between two fundamentally different approaches: “Am I going to give in to fear because there is some rot, press gently; not macerate a lot; not keep a lot of lees; work with clean juice and plenty of sulfur? Or am I going to take another direction to counterbalance high acidity by macerating long, pressing deeply, putting a lot of lees in the wines, and aging a long time on those lees” and in his case without racking or adding sulfur. The barrels were topped not with wine but with stored lees, and Saouma gave me a chance to taste the richly-textured, fragrant quality of lees still retained after 18 months. Despite the fact that malo-lactic conversion is nearly always late in this cellar, the 2008s finished more or less on schedule, which here means by late summer or September. Alcohol levels, incidentally, generally finished just a bit over 13% in both vintages. The first, highly selective rackings of 2008s were due to take place soon after I tasted in March, with bottling anticipated between late spring and September of this year. “They’re still slippery fish,” noted Saouma’s partner, (and spouse) Rotem Brakir, this March of their evolving 2008s, and added: “We like to see the wines tasting every day well for two months before we bottle.” I last tasted most of the 2007s solely in June, 2009, and most of t