Bright, full red. Less expressive and more brooding than the Suchots, offering deeper aromas of minerals, smoked meat, menthol and cocoa. Dense, sappy and almost painfully intense, with a wonderfully generous texture and spherical shape. Best today on the explosive, mounting, lightly saline finish. Bigger than the Suchots but less vibrant and harmonious now. This should be approachable within five years but should continue to improve into its early teens.

In contrast to the wonderfully layered nose of the Suchots, here the profile runs more toward the floral side of the aromatic spectrum with intense violet and rose petal notes that are overtly spicy while displaying touch of crushed red berries, hoisin and soy, all of which can be found on the pure, refined, intense and energetic middle weight flavors that are precise, minerally and linear, all wrapped in an explosive finish that seems to go on and on. A Zen wine of perfect balance.

The Arnoux 2007 Romanee Saint-Vivant smells of smoked meats, resin, lightly-cooked black fruits, and forest floor. Palpably dense and a bit stewed, its opacity is the antithesis of the best wines of 2008, yet it’s impossible to resist the blandishments of this cru’s sheer berry-sweetness, cocoa powder richness, and saliva-inducing, salt-tinged meatiness. I would look for ten or a dozen years of satisfaction from this, perhaps more, but at the same time, I’m skeptical that it will need to be held for more than a few years to reveal its full potential. I tasted Pascal Lachaux’s 2008s soon after their late-January bottling, and a few of them may have been suffering from trauma they thereby sustained, but on the whole this was an impressive if darkly-hued and unapologetically firmly-structured collection. Lachaux reports that his malos were “on time, normal,” and adds “the truth about 2008 and why the malos were so often retarded is that people sulfured the fruit too heavily at the advice of their enologues.” Even at bottling, Lachaux reports that he was sparing with sulfur and expected to take advantage of the high levels of residual CO2 in his 2008s. He says he allowed temperatures to rise during the fermentation as a means of extracting more flavor without having to actively work the cap and in consequence risk pulling out green flavors or hard tannins. This approach may explain the particularly low-toned personality of this 2008 collection, which certainly didn’t leave me wishing that the wines had sustained additional pigeage! If the number of magnums I saw is any indication, Lachaux seriously intends on putting to the test his confidence in this vintage’s aging potential. Yet he is also very keen on his 2007s, those of which I tasted from bottle were indeed impressive, though I seem even in this instance to be missing what those growers most enamored of their 2007s profess to perceive. Importer: Rosenthal Wine Merchant, Pine Plains, NY; tel. (800) 910-1990