1999 Domaine Henri Gouges Nuits St Georges Les Pruliers

Seasonal treat from the dungeon. Wonderful clean freshness for an oldie. Good red colour, gloriously red fruited with an almost austere tug of great tannin and acidity. Remington Norman’s Burgundy book mentions the extremely low yields the Gouges favour and this bears that out. Dense, round and deep. Untrammelled by any new oak. Paradoxically succulent and firmly spartan, ballerina poise. All my golden russet autumns in a bottle and there’s a few of them now.

13% alcohol. Cork. Was about 35 euros, contributing to a very heavy carry on before the 100ml limit. Them were the days.

96 points.

Well, it seems there’s more than one bottle of this in the cellar, so now there’s two less. The second from an the Australian importer looks considerably more developed with an autumnal and caramel fog lying across the cool flow of dense fruit and stern rocks. It had been on the shelf for a while, so maybe some early damage done? Much is made of the fanciful detail in Burgundy’s individual vineyards but slow sniffing and sipping is like a weird geological exploration, yes really. If you’ve ever driven out of the city’s fug, opened the car door somewhere refreshingly rural and taken a deep breath, well, it’s sort of like that. Silly old wino you say, definitely. Nonetheless, it’s a beautiful drink of that Burgundian paradox of poised fruit and rugged stone.

Still as above in numbers apart from the price in Australia. Just been in a warmer place for a while.

Published by

cognitivebottletherapy

Everyday events struggle to share space with wine thoughts in an ever shrinking brain.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s