Ripe mulberry and blackberry, game, and dark chocolate mark the nose and finely-tannic palate of Liger-Belair’s 2008 Richebourg, for which all of the fruit was destemmed. Fresh ginger, blond tobacco, caramelized root vegetables, and crushed stone are among the diverse added complications of this dense, compact exemplar of its great site that finishes with vibratory, reverberating intensity. This was not due to be bottled before summer and might well grow in stature before that happens, but it will certainly deserve half a dozen years neglect in the cellar and be fascinating to follow for ten or a dozen years thereafter.
Thibault Liger-Belair was bullish on his 2008s – and for good reason, pointing out that for him, the challenge of rot was significantly greater in 2007. That said, his collection from the latter vintage is impressive of its kind, too, and I concur with his assessment (a far more conservative one than I heard from many growers) that the best 2007s should be worth following for a decade, but probably not much longer. He felt confident in both 2007 and 2008 to utilize stems and whole clusters extensively in fermentation, as is his wont whenever he deems it possible. Most of the Thibault Liger-Belair 2008s had been bottled a month before I tasted them – a late start on bottling by the standards he has thus far set. Liger-Belair says he has now settled into a biodynamic regimen for all of his vineyards, after having first tried out certain methods on property he acquired in the Hautes-Cotes in 2004. He opines that among other things these methods have rendered the vine wood more supple, which permits elevating and expanding the canopy without shading the fruit or risking wind-snapped branches, and he believes this expansion was critical to the measure of ripeness he was able to achieve in the prolonged, breezy late innings of 2008.
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