2001 Charmes Chambertin

Coffee-laced blackberries are found in the expressive aromatics of the medium-bodied 2001 Charmes-Chambertin. This wine shares the Amoureuses’s syrupy, blackberry dominated flavor profile, yet adds loads of spices, espresso beans, black cherries, and hints of licorice to the mix. Its prolonged finish displays ripe tannin enveloped in even more layers of sweet fruit. This impressively endowed, sensual effort should be consumed between 2004 and 2012. This relatively new negociant firm has, in a few short years, grown to a production of 140,000 bottles in 2002 (in 2001, 90,000 bottles were produced). Needing to expand, it acquired the facilities of Corbert, a company that formerly produced large quantities of bulk wine, right on the N74 in Morey-St.-Denis. The resourceful Frederic Magnien converted Corbert’s 1,300 hectoliter (34,300 gallon) tanks into barrel aging cellars simply by cutting doors into the resin-coated concrete. A young, dynamic, hard-working man, Magnien feels 2001 “is what we in Burgundy like to call a classic vintage, whatever that means, it certainly did not reach the physiological maturity levels of 1997, 1999, or 2000.” He added that it was a year of “good surprises, given the weather. With intelligent green harvesting to correct the maturation spread due to the extremely long flowering, it was possible to have very nice fruit. The great surprise came after the malo-lactic fermentations, when the wines put on lots of fat. Yields were the same as 2000. There were 13 new moons in both years. The old-timers say that 13 moon vintages always produce betteraves (literally beets, in Burgundian slang it means huge fruit clusters), and they’ve been proven right once again.” Importer: David Hinkle / Peter Vezan, North Berkeley Imports, Berkeley, CA; tel. (800) 266-6585