he Dublere 2007 Savigny-les-Beaune Les Rouvrettes offers unusual aromas of caramelized parsnip and celeriac, along with tart cherry and red currant. Juicy and refreshing though rather light-weight, it displays a marginally ripe, though far from uninteresting, aspect of the vintage and a tart, cherry pit-inflected finish. Here, I’m not prepared to follow Pethel in his estimation of potential longevity and would opt for enjoying this over the next several years. With 2008, Pethel swapped out his contract on this site for Les Talemettes from the same grower.
Asked which of the vintages was more challenging, North Carolina ex-pat Blair Pethel just laughs at first and then says: “I lost more fruit to the tri in ‘07 than I did in ‘08. We had to rush in ‘07 because fruit was rotting on the vines. In ‘08, after the north wind came up and the sun came out, you could wait, and the rot dried out.” I tasted the ‘08s here already at the end of February, just before they were assembled into tank for an expected May bottling. They had lost a bit of color to recent sulfuring, which I suspect had also slightly depressed their fruit, hopefully only temporarily. (In 2009, Pethel practiced an incremental regimen of sulfuring instead.) For more details on his operation – which is a “domaine” only by trademark, as he contracts for most of his fruit – please consult issue 180, where I first reported on the whites, which are show-stoppers in 2008, incidentally, just as they were in 2007.
A Becky Wasserman Selection (various importers), Le Serbet; fax 011- 333-80-24-29-70; also imported by Pas Mal Selections, New York, NY; tel. (201) 567 2028 and Schneider’s of Capital Hill, Washington, DC tel. (202) 543 9300
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