Domain Cecile Tremblay Vosne Romanee Les Rouges du Dessus 2008

Reviewed by

David Schildknecht

Published

2010-06-29

Tremblay’s 2008 Vosne Romanee Rouge du Dessus represents her first separate bottling from that high-elevation site whose fruit she last year included in her Vosne Vieilles Vignes. High-toned distilled dark fruit notes and elusive forest floor intimations make for a striking aromatic display. The pairing of pure, ripe though not at all superficially sweet cassis and black raspberry fruit with sirloin juices, cardamom and black pepper, salt and chalk here is quite striking, leading to a saliva-inducing as well as thought-provoking finish. This isn’t cuddly either in texture or content, and it’s already intimating the many deep, dark places it’s likely to take you. A fine tannic suffusion and palpably low pH suggest tensile strength. I predict more than a decade of utter fascination and irresistible appetite-inducement. Cecile Tremblay scored some of the most consistent successes of any Cote d’Or Pinot domaine with her 2008 collection and those from among her 2007 bottlings that I was able to sample included a couple of wines exceptionally impressive for that vintage. Tremblay blames irregular flowering and correspondingly disparate ripeness rather than any rot for the 25% of her 2008 fruit that she says was discarded on the sorting table, but pronounces herself “quite content” with the results, a judgment I can only characterize as exhibiting a ridiculous degree of restraint! (And while she didn’t mention it and I didn’t ask to taste it, I saw a lot of 2008 Bourgogne Rose lying around in bins at Tremblay’s temporary cellar quarters in Gevrey.) To convey an idea of the concentration of raw material with which she was working, Tremblay noted that most of her fermentative lots were give only a single pigeage … that’s not per day, but in total. Anywhere from one- to two-thirds of whole clusters with stems were included in the ferments, with the most striking wines tending toward the higher end. The 2008s here (save for three noted) were still in barrels (form which I sampled representatives) when I last tasted, and were due to have been bottled in late spring. Incidentally, Tremblay recovered more of her family’s properties with the 2009 vintage, which also yielded a bumper crop per vine of irresistible ripeness and what appear to be for the vintage unusual depth and verve, so any wine lovers have trouble scoring some bottles of 2008s might get their chance from 2009 despite the hype already surrounding that vintage. Importer: Weygandt-Metzler, Unionville, PA; tel. (610) 486-0800

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Reviewed by

Jancis Robinson

Published

2010-01-11

Drink Date

2012 - 2015

She bought the vineyard in 2006. Dry on the front palate and very solid, with a rather tough end. Nuanced and potentially promising but pretty dry and raw at this stage.

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