Description
89-91 Points, Neal Martin, The Wine Advocate, 30th December 2016
The 2015 Hautes Cotes de Nuits Rouge is matured in three-year-old barrels. I probably prefer the aromatics here vis-a-vis the Bourgogne Rouge, offering soft red cherries and crushed strawberry scents. The palate is smooth and harmonious, offering ample crisp red cherry and strawberry fruit, and leading to a detailed and precise finish that is a delight. This comes recommended – an excellent wine from Michel Gros.
“The dryness was the most important thing – very small rainfall during the winter,” Michel Gros told me when I visited his winery in Vosne-Romanee. “Flowering passed normally but the dryness created a small harvest. July was warm, August and September 1°C higher than normal with a lot of sunshine hours. The harvest began on 5 September and we picked within 4 days, before tackling the Hautes Cotes de Nuits on 12 September where we harvested in between the rains showers around that time. The berries were ripe but small. It is a vintage not unlike 2005 and 2010, but the tannins are suppler than in 2005. I fermented at a temperature a little lower than usual, the cuvaison 12-14 days with a prefermentation cold-maceration. Everything was de-stemmed as usual and the wines will spend around 18 months in barrel, though because of the small harvest the percent of new oak is little higher, 40-45% for the village, 60-65% for the premier crus.” Michel has a particular modus operandi that sometimes I think works well and other times leaves me feeling a bit perplexed. There were several occasions here where I felt that the winemaking approach was speaking louder than the growing season and/or terroir expression. However, there are some lovely wines, especially the Nuits Saint-Georges les Chaliots that punches above its weight for a premier cru, and the Nuits Saint-Georges 1er Cru itself.
