Reviews

JCB's pinots are gradually becoming more impressive over the years. This '11 isn't their greatest effort given the huge difficulties of the cold vintage, but it is a success. Brisk acidity and a clean, dry mouthfeel make the raspberry, red currant , white pepper and sandalwood flavors attractive to drink now.

Editor's Choice. A beautiful Chardonnay, dry, crisp in acidity and complex in tropical and citrus fruit, peach, honey and oak flavors. The richness is balanced by a flavorful minerality and the finish is dry. At this price, the wine can stand beside more expensive Chardonnays, which make it a value.

Best Buy. An ornate, red-fruikted Nuits, this starts out with the dark, barrel spice of oak and brightens into layers of fruit and earthy scents in the finish. Juicy, tight and youhtfully blunt, this will gain from several years in the cellar.

Black and sleek with the dark-roast coffee scent of expensive oak, this wine's graceful fruit and incipient complexity is overtaken up front by that smokiness. But it's the strawberry essence that lasts in the finish, warm and powerful, ready to go the distance in the cellar.

Intense and powerful, but as yet unformed, this starts with fruity layers of black cherry skin then hits a wall of tannins. Heady in its peppery scents and closed off behind those tannins, this is formidable, if difficult to read as young wine. For the cellar.

Intense and powerful, but as yet unformed, this starts with fruity layers of black cherry skin then hits a wall of tannins. Heady in its peppery scents and closed off behind those tannins, this is formidable, if difficult to read as young wine. For the cellar.

This wine feels cool and elegant, with the silky texture and floral spice of Chambolle. The fruit contrasts raspberries with rosemary-scented tannins, the herbal character winning out for now. Cellar it to let the fruit evolve.

This has the earthern cool of cave, its bright red cherry flavors shaded toward dark rose and smoky tannins. Quiet rather than flash, this has enough flavor concentration and spicy tannins to develop over the next several years.

More challenging that the Clos de Prieure, Le Clos Blanc offers so much heady complexity and gripping power that it feels gruff, needing a day for its tannic leesiness to mellow into savory scents. It tastes like a spcie box explosion, a grand wine that will be more approachable with ten years of bottle age. White grapes have grown at this 5.63-acre vineyard since 1100, currently 95 percent chardonnay, four percent pinot gris, and one percent pinot blanc, farmed under biodynamics since 2001. The vines are adjacent to the Chateau du Vougeot, neighboring Musigny and Les Amoureuses across the northern wall in Chambolle.

This two-acre walled vineyard once belonged to the Benedictine priory of the abbey of St-Germain-des-Pres in Paris. The chardonnay vines face east, were they border the Vouge stream, growing in calccareous soil with a lot of pebbles. The wine itself is all about minerals, its powerful density following a gracious, simple line. Deep and satisfyingly rich, its gravitas is lightened by scents of spice and flowers.