2008 Chambolle Musigny Les Fuees
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Tasting notes
The 2008 Chambolle-Musigny Les Fuees is a weightless, effortless wine graced with sensual fruit and a soft, sensual finish. Dried flowers and mint linger on the finish. This is at once relatively open for the year, yet also a touch fleeting. It’s hard to envision the Fuees as a long-term wine, but then again, Mugnier’s wines are deceptive. Anticipated maturity: 2011-2020. With each passing year Frederic Mugnier has let up on the reigns of winemaking and allowed the vintage to take center stage. His wines now reflect the unique qualities of each harvest to an exacting degree. Mugnier describes the 2009s as rich, powerful and exceptionally dense wines that will be at their most exciting in several decades’ time, or – as Mugnier says with his typically dry sense of humor – when he’s no longer around. The vintage was marked by one week of very hot weather towards the end of the growing season, although on average 2009 was not a hot year. The harvest began on September 10. For the 2009s Mugnier destemmed 100% of the fruit as he didn’t feel he had the phenolic ripeness in the stems to use whole clusters. Fermentations lasted about three weeks, an approach which is now pretty much consistent from year to year. ‘Long, slow and gentle,’ Mugnier says. The wines were racked once and were scheduled to be bottled between April and May 2011. The percentage of new oak barrels continues to drop and is now between 15-20% across the entire range. I also tasted all of the 2008s, a vintage in which Mugnier’s wines are stratospheric for their sheer beauty, elegance and pedigree. In 2008 the harvest began on September 26, two full weeks after 2009, which is pretty consistent across domaines in these two years. Today the 2008s appear to have more finesse and silkiness. This will be a fascinating vintage to follow here. A Becky Wasserman Selection, Le Serbet, various American importers, including: Martin Scott Wines, Little Neck, NY; tel. (516) 327-0808; Veritas Imports, Beverly Hills, CA; tel. (310) 205-3803; Toepfer Imports LLC, CO; tel. (303) 818-7640
Critic scores
Average Score
Antonio Galloni, Vinous
Jancis Robinson MW
More reviews and scores
Medium red. Musky red fruits and underbrush on the nose. Supple and silky but classically dry, with cherry fruit complicated by spicy, peppery soil tones. More muscular than the village Chambolle and more tannic too. I'd give this four or five years in the cellar.
Medium red. Black raspberry, flowers and a musky minerality on the nose, along with a cooler suggestion of menthol. Tighter and more medicinal than the village wine, with a youthful toughness to the briary black fruit flavors. Not as high-pitched as the village example, but this backward wine displays impressive palate-staining sweetness on the broad, spicy back end.
Pale crimson. Then a dense, mossy, intriguing nose. Lots of energy. So fruity and transparent! Light but fresh and there is interesting wildness here. Polished and relatively light but with great balance. (JR)