2012 Gevrey Chambertin Champerrier Vieilles Vignes

The 2012 Gevrey-Chambertin Vieilles Vignes Champerrier has an ebullient bouquet that will offer natural, brambly raspberry and wild strawberry fruit interlaced with fine minerality and precision. The palate is medium-bodied with fine tannins encasing pert, poised red berry fruit. It feels long and languorous in the mouth while the finish exerts just a pleasant grip. The new wood will eventually lend it more breadth than it presently shows. Excellent. Several weeks after visiting Guillaume Tardy at his winery on the RN74 to taste the 2011s, I was back to taste the following vintage. Tardy is one of the young and upcoming winemakers of Vosne-Romanee. His tenets are quite straightforward: 100% de-stemming and no crushing, one week cold maceration at 10 or 11 degrees and gentle extraction by infusion, like a tea bag, in order to avoid astringent tannins and enhance silky textures. Ergo, Tardy-s wines often have a modern sheen, perhaps even a glossiness that distinguishes them for others. I have been a fan of these wines ever since I was introduced to them several years ago in London, though Guillaume stressed that since the introduction of temperature-controlled vats with the 2010 vintage, he has been achieving ever greater precision in his wines. Like several other winemakers, his approach is for a more reductive maturation in barrel, using the carbon dioxide to act as a natural barrier. All the samples were taken from one-year-old barrels although I tasted one or two from bottled blends in order to examine the influence of the new oak on what will be the final blend. -The 2012s have more freshness because of the higher acidity,- he explained. -They are very vivacious. I think that 2012 is a better vintage for aging compared to 2011 as you have acidity, structure and ripe tannins. We started picking on September 23 and finished one week later. The harvest was not easy as it was raining quite a lot, but we had a very nice August and beginning of September. It was sunny until the September 22 and then we had 20mm of rain during the night. It was a wet harvest, but in the end the grapes were healthy. It reminds me a little of 2002, but it is not as concentrated as 2005 and keeps a delicate touch, so they will be more approachable. 2012 is a big 2010.- Importer: Becky Wasserman Selection (Le Serbet) and through various US importers (see www.leserbet.com for full list).