An especially rigorous triage was necessary on Tremblay's 2006 Chambolle-Musigny Les Feusselottes due to the hail, and the pungent, smoky spiciness of aroma here introduces a palate pungency that goes beyond the aggressiveness of most other wines in this collection and segues into a certain hard astringency. Prune and rhubarb seem best to define the dried and tart fruit aspects that no doubt – like the wine's severity and pungency – reflect less than optimum conditions of fruit. An underlying meat stock character offers more sense of richness than do the wine's fruit flavors. This is, however, formidably dense as well as explosively intense in finish, and one simply needs to revisit – in, say, 2011 – to assess the evolution of its tannins. Tremblay – who thinks this wine was still suffering post-bottling stress when I tasted it – says it was not that the berries themselves were hit, but that the damage to foliage and trauma inflicted on the vines by the hail – when combined with the shut-down and desiccation engendered by the July heat wave – played havoc with proper skin maturation in the tiny berries produced by this old selection massale.
"Given the amount and character of tannin in 2006," reports Cecile Tremblay, "a lot of changes had to be made" in handling to guarantee extraction of pure fruit and the encouragement of depth and textural polish, notably the gentleness of both pressing and maceration. (I had to offer Tremblay – and now do my readers – an apology for stating in my detailed report in issue 171 that she and Pascal Roblet were married. That was never the case – although I am not the only person to have made this mistake – and in any event the two have now gone their separate wine ways. Tremblay crushed her most recent vintage at cellars in her home town of Vosne-Romanee.)
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