Roumier's 2008 Ruchottes-Chambertin is drop-dead gorgeous. Layers of dark fruit, violets, pepper and flowers meld together in this multi-dimensional, beautifully textured wine. Despite its weightless elegance, this shows plenty of vitality, and a cool vibrant personality that will fully emerge only after several additional years in bottle.

Palish medium red. Higher-pitched on the nose than the Charmes-Chambertin, offering scents of raspberry, faded rose and spices. Sweet, spicy and light on its feet, with terrific inner-mouth energy give superb definition to the red fruit, spice and floral flavors. Very vivid wine with a finish that leaves the taste buds vibrating. Roumier noted that the 2008s are a bit like the '93s, "but richer." He also compared them to the 2002s, but said that the earlier set of wines was more elegant.

Tasted assembled in tank shortly before bottling, Roumier's 2008 Ruchottes-Chambertin evinces smoked meats, peat, rhubarb, and red raspberry in a pungent aromatic and palate display backed by a carpet of forest floor and an underlying, saliva-inducing sense of rare, salted red meat juices. This displays the enervation of the vintage allied to a firmly-knit structure yet its primary sap and juiciness keeps me licking my lips long after it has been spit and the wine truly seems to take you in its toothy grip. I would plan on cellaring this for 5-6 years before broaching more than the first bottle, and expect it will challenge many a 2005 for longevity, well into its second decade. Christophe Roumier says his 2008 fruit demanded rigorous sorting to remove under-ripe bunches (whereas in 2007 this was necessary to remove rot), but he liked what was left enough to indulge in a significant proportion (most frequently 50%) of stems and whole clusters for the fermentations. "With such tiny, perfect berries, it was almost a shame to de-stem any of them," he remarks. Late to go through malo, like so many others of that year, these 2008s certainly preserve the vintage's primary virtues of vivacity and interactive complexity. Not more than 50% new wood was employed, to guard against loss of the vintage's vividly bright fruit in a vintage Roumier felt was unusually sensitive in that regard. Some of the 2008s remind him of 1980 or, more precisely, of what the 1980s could have become given today's standards of viticulture and selection. Roumier has a higher opinion of 2007 and their age-worthiness than do I, considering them superior to 2006 or 2008 - and given the way the two that I tasted from bottle showed, that opinion is not inexplicable. (I tasted the other Roumier 2007s too early in their evolution to render proper verdicts, although they were certainly effusively generous if not yet complex even pre-malo.) Roumier employed comparable percentages of stems and whole clusters, and indulged in more frequent pigeage than in 2008, comparing his resulting 2007s with 1985s. Importer: Diageo Chateau and Estate Wines Company, New York, NY; tel. (212) 419-1400