Black tea on the nose; a stony background on the palate; and palate inflections of ginger and rhubarb all offer counterpoint to an almost raspberry syrup-like sweetness of fruit as well as a vanillin overlay in the Dujac 2007 Clos St.-Denis. While this might sound like the recipe for yet another bifurcated wine of its vintage, somehow the whole Gestalt works. The combination of relative delicacy with intensity of flavor; tenderness of texture with a focused if elusive sense of minerality; and satisfying primary juiciness all suggest a wine as worth revisiting 4-5 years from now as it is a delight today. “It’s a quintessential Dujac wine,” says Seysses, more or less summarizing my impressions. It should be worth following for close to a decade.
The Dujac 2008s were not racked until last December, and bottling took place January through March. “The malic acid numbers were high-ish, but not significantly higher than in, say, 2006 or 2001,” says Jeremy Seysses in an effort to explain what he admitted were “for us, excessively late malos. I have a feeling it was a lack of nutrients that were wash out,” he continues, since, after all, “it rained a lot in 2008” with, he adds, “poor fruit set proving to be the vintage’s saving grace. I think we would actually have had less to harvest (i.e. worth keeping) if we had had a better fruit set. There was rot, but can you find it in any of the wines? That’s a credit to how far Burgundy has come along in terms of sorting” (which Dujac does exclusively in the vineyard, not on sorting tables – the name of their U.S. importer ironically notwithstanding). “I didn’t love my lack of options in 2007,” says Seysses of the preceding season, “so we picked early – earlier even than in 2003.” In vinification “we decided not to force too much, and just to keep it charming,” which is exactly how I thought the wines turned out. “At Domaine Dujac, we’re never been that attached to deep color, so we’re quite tolerant (in that regard), and the least thing we wanted to do was make hard wines. I de-stemmed more (than usual, or than in 2008). The fruit felt fragile, so in barrel I kept the wines under a bit more free sulfur than usual, which reinforced their lightness.” Seysses opines that 2007 was not a year in which old selections displayed their overall superiority to clones, because “if yo(‘re Pinots) were riper earlier, you were ripe while it was raining,” whereas in 2008 you could scarcely get too much ripeness.
Importer: The Sorting Table, Napa, CA; tel. (415) 491-4724
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