Gevrey Chambertin Lavaux Saint Jacques, Lucien Le Moine 2008

A strikingly complex nose to Le Moine's 2008 Gevrey-Chambertin Lavaux St.-Jacques (of which there are two barrels) mingles smoky, sweet, machine oil with a pungent, saline tang of anchovy, violets, marjoram, ripe cherry, and a hint of manure. Had I smelled this blind, I might well have waxed fantastically about garrigue in the South of France! Certainly one imagines a special sort of concentration taking place in this already cool, windswept site in the cool, windy late September and early October of 2008, making for an impression as if the scrubby, conifer-dotted neighboring woods had been imprinted on the Pinot fruit. A satin-textured, richly ripe yet bright and strikingly, pungently mineral palate impression lingers tongue-tantalizingly even as one tries to decipher the message from one of those sorts of red Burgundy whose mystery will thankfully remain inscrutable. Regular readers will know by now that I have an abiding affection for this site, and here is a remarkable portrait of it. But it you are largely into a Pinot diet of fruits and berries, the free range menu served up in this bottle will not excite you, and might even turn you off. I would count on at least 15 years of further fascination. The rendition from Saouma and Brakir's first (1999) vintage today displays haunting complexity of a similar sort.