2012 - Pommard 1er Cru Les Croix Noires, Louis Boillot

(just one barrel produced): Bright full red. Redcurrant and menthol aromas are carrying a full load of new oak. Creamy and concentrated, with a fine-grained texture and excellent sucrosite to its chewy red fruit and mineral flavors. Shows a more refined texture than the Fremiers but this wine will need time to absorb its oak element. Finishes with chewy but ripe tannins and excellent supporting fruit. This is aging in a 2009 barrel now but began in a new one; Boillot said he should have moved it earlier but pointed out that the wine won't be bottled until April. Very promising.

The 2012 Pommard 1er Cru Les Croix-Noirs was aged in a single new barrel and then racked into a used barrel after malo-lactic. The nose is very open and expressive with vivacious red berry fruit that leap from the glass. The palate is well balanced, showing a lot of wood at the moment but that will be subsumed with time. This will be giving drinking pleasure over the next 10 years once it absorbs the new oak. Having tasted with his wife Ghislaine Barthod in the morning, I returned to the same address in the afternoon to see Louis Boillot. The domaine was established in 2002 when his father split the family domaine, Louis Boillot & Fils, between Louis and his brother Pierre. Henri Boillot is their cousin. It is an interesting set up: half the cellar reserved for Ghislaine’s wines and the other for her husband’s and whilst I have a great deal of experience with the former, I was less acquainted with Boillot’s. However I am glad that I did the time to sample through an impressive portfolio that were generally balanced, refined and skilfully expressed their terroir. In common with so many other producers, the affects of poor flowering, coulure and millerandage reduced yields. His Volnay Caillerets was reduced down to just half a barrel and in the case of his Pommard Village, down to a negligible three crates of grapes that were blended into the Bourgogne Rouge. Louis also rued the fact that the decreased total number of barrels meant that the ratio of new oak is a little higher than he might have liked, and therefore after vinifying in new oak he often transferred his wines into used oak after malo-lactic fermentations. Generally, this strategy worked and most of his 2012 did not exhibit excessive levels of wood. I would zone in on Louis’s exquisite Volnay wines that seemed to put the traumas of the growing season behind them, whilst the Nuits Saint Georges is exemplary. Importer: Sussex Wine and Rare Wine Company (CA) and several importers in the UK including La