The Labruyere 2009 Moulin-a-Vent Le Clos du Moulin-a-Vent – bottled in April of this year (and a bottling referred to in vintage 2008 simply as “Clos du Moulin”) – features brown-spiced and smoked meat-tinged blackberry and cassis. Like its little sibling, it displays admirable primary juiciness and vivacity for a wine so rich and from a vintage so ripe, but here the tannins are considerably finer. As Gublin points out, despite its protracted malo-lactic transformation, the raw material for this 2009 harbored relatively little malic acid, and there was thus ample supply of more efficacious tartaric acid even if the total, combined acidity of the must was only modest. Furthermore, the final blend managed to come out not much over 14%, and displays fullness with only a hint of heat. Sappy and substantial – with notes of beef marrow, iodine, and crushed stone adding further interest – this finishes vigorously, portending at least a half dozen years’ aging potential.
Proprietor Edouard Labruyere and oenologist Nadine Gublin – for details about whose collaborative revival of the Labruyere family estate and its choice holdings, consult my issue 190 report – have given their 2009s the extended elevage they promised will be routine here, the Grande Cuvee having been bottled in December of last year and the Clos only this April. Possibly this long elevage – along with adept blending – is what has tamed the impressions engendered by their 2009s’ high alcohol when they were tasted from cask in June 2010. Long stays in barrel chez Domaine Labruyere are to be sure in part conditioned by nature, and when I visited this June – just as had been the case the year before – many of the young wines were still in malo, making it impossible to offer detailed notes on how the eventual 2010s will taste. Suffice it to say based on the lots I sampled, that there is greater vivacity and salinity as well as levity than was found in the 2008s or 2009s, albeit without the richness of 2009. (Overall, the 2010s weighed-in at under 13% alcohol – with one lot having even been lightly chaptalized.) It will be very interesting to see how this relatively low pH material takes to its sojourn in barrel (fewer than 10% of which will have been new). “I’m very content with these 2010s,” remarks Gublin, who began picking them on September 17, “indeed it was a lovely surprise how things turned out.” Issuing in large part from the Champs de Cour and La Roche lieux-dits very near the famed windmill.
(WA 31st Aug 2011)
