2005 Maison Bertrand Ambroise Nuits-Saint-Georges

From sites in both Premeaux-Prissey and around Nuits-St.-Georges itself, the Ambroise 2005 Nuits-St.-Georges offers yet another formidable combination of smoky meatiness with bitter black fruits, its severity accentuated by distinctly resinous and tannic notes of new wood. Unyieldingly firm in texture, this finishes with a brash intensity of raw black cherry and blackberry, resin and spice. The tannins surely demand 3-5 years in bottle just to reveal the wine’s true colors. Amboise characterized this year’s fruit as consisting of “perfect berries, solid and well-structured” from which he concluded it should all be de-stemmed and a cautious approach taken to extraction. But caution is relative. Bertrand Ambroise certainly vinifies with a fanatic dedication to quality, but also with no concessions to the faint of heart, and his formidably tannic 2005s will strike some tasters as hyper-concentrated and flirting with over-extraction. Perhaps a bit more refinement and differentiation might have been achieved with a less robust and woody approach? Ambroise works largely with 400-liter barrels in an effort to preserve fruit by diminishing the surface-to-volume ratio and thus the flavoring effects of new wood, but I cannot claim that I would have recognized that fact in the wines themselves. Importer: Robert Kacher Selections, Washington, DC; tel. (202) 832-9083