Good bright red. Complex, highly aromatic nose offers redcurrant, tobacco, game, iron, leather and peppery herbs. Sweeter in the middle and more powerful than the Pruliers but with lively spiciness and peppery lift. Finishes ripe and long. A lovely wine, seemingly less austere than the 2009 version.

Raw red meat and tart cherry in the nose of Gouges’s 2008 Nuits-St.-Georges Les Vaucrains are accented with sage, white pepper, and salinity, all of which combine in the mouth for a pungency, vivacious, saliva-inducing, and deeply-concentrated impression. Here are both the meat and the meat-tenderizing acids, herbs, and brine in one, handy glass! This displays a surprisingly caressing, silken texture to compliment its brightness, and finishes with vibratory intensity as well as invigoration and refreshment such as one doesn’t expect from its genre. The strongly mineral and carnal elements as well as the slightly acerbic personality will excite some of us more than they will others. I think this will prove delightfully and intriguingly versatile over the next 12-15 years. Gregory Gouges admits that he and his family, in 2008, picked a tough year for completing their conversion to organic viticulture, but he notes that the winds of late September rather radically desiccated most botrytized or otherwise imperfect berries and that this played directly into the forte of vibratory sorting tables on which such berries were simply shaken-away. Yields here were only in the 30-35 hectoliter per hectare range. Harvest began already September 30 and fruit came in between 12-12.5% potential alcohol. Chaptalization was minimal, and then only on a few lots in an effort to prolong fermentation. Malos were late and long, but nevertheless finished by summer’s end; and bottling was early by estate norms, with one exception completed between December and February. New facilities enable the Gouges to achieve better temperature-control during fermentations and to avoid pumping. Importer: Vineyard Brands, Birmingham, AL; tel. (205) 980-8802