Smoked meat and salt-, kelp-, and iodine-laced maritime mineral overlays to the sweetly ripe berry and pit fruit concentrate of de Vogue’s 2007 Musigny Vieilles Vignes make for a Pinot as intriguing as it is eager to caress and please. Plush, polished, and possessed of formidable sheer sap, it displays an energy and interplay seldom revealed in this vintage. A mineral savor of crustacean shell reduction keeps pace with nearly candied sweetness of berry fruit – and keeps you salivating uncontrollably – all the way to a distant finishing line. Francois Millet – always keen to pinpoint the expression of fruit he finds in each vintage – characterizes that of 2008 as “syrup-like,” and of 2007 as “candied.” I am skeptical that these metaphors can be generalized, but under no circumstances should “syrup-like” be taken as an attempt to deny the brightness or transparency displayed by so many of the best 2008s, including these. “To have been picked late” – in this instance, starting September 27 – “to have been picked cold, and to have fermented very slowly to created the largest amount of glycerol to combine with the freshness of the vintage,” opines Millet, constitutes a significant part of the 2008s’ secret, seduction, even mystery. “Late malo” – here completed in August – he adds, “was also good, so that the vintage could have a true childhood, and slowly, surely build itself. If we had had a southern wind when the weather changed, maybe we would have lost that identity of 2008. But by there being a northern wind, the evolution was continued” i.e. in a constant, cool trajectory. Not to short-change it, the 2007 vintage collection here is one of those few capable of standing direct comparison to its immediate successor – or indeed to nearly any other vintage from this address.
By David Schildknecht June 2010
