Wine Advisor
Meo Camuzet, Clos de Vougeot Grand Cru 2005
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Description
Meo Camuzet, Clos Vougeot, Grand Cru, Burgundy, France, Still, Red, 2010
Tasting notes
Reviewed by: Stephen Tanzer
Good deep red-ruby color. Wild black and red cherry aroma complicated by a truffley nuance. Creamy and fine-grained, with an uncanny thickness for this cuvee As rich as this is, though, it also boasts very good inner-mouth lift. I don't really recall having this kind of creaminess in this cuvee, Meo admits. Maybe the '99 approaches this.
Reviewed by: Stephen Tanzer
Saturated ruby-red. Scented aromas of black cherry, violet, minerals and licorice. Bright, impressively concentrated and sweet, with flavors of black cherry and minerals. Boasts a lovely sugar/acid balance and does not come across as hard or sullen today. This sweet, generous, seriously structured wine really spreads out to coat the palate on the very long aftertaste.
Reviewed by: David Schildknecht
The 2005 Clos Vougeot displays roasted, singed meatiness along with bitter-sweet, szechuan pepper-tinged mulberry fruit. Boasting terrific density on the palate, fineness of tannin, clarity of fruit, and saline, chalk and wet stone manifestations of mineral, this finishes with pungent spice and stone fruit. Lock this away for 8-10 years. Between the effects of drought and of localized hail (in May, before it could effect quality) Jean-Nicolas Meo reported one of his smallest-ever harvests. His production, however, is being boosted these days by a range of negociant wines under the label “Meo-Camuzet Frere et Soeur” (marked “F&S” in the listing above). The top wines had been assembled in tank and sulfured in preparation for bottling, and were suffering a bit on account of this. Importer: Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Berkeley, CA; tel. (510) 524-1524. Also a Jean-Marie de Champs Selection (various importers), French fax 011 33 3 80 22 58 25.
Reviewed by: Neal Martin
The 2005 Clos de Vougeot Grand Cru has an obdurate nose, dark berry fruit, Earl Grey and earthy scents, a light algae aroma emerging with time. Fine delineation. The palate is medium-bodied with forward berry fruit laced with black pepper. Not complex per se, but with more weight and concentration than the '01 on the lightly spiced finish. Fine, though like many '05s, serious! Tasted at the Méo-Camuzet dinner at Arbor in Hong Kong.
About the Producer
Founded in the early 20th Century by Etie, Méo-Camuzet is one of the figureheads of Vosne-Romanée as well as an old family of the village. Back in 1920, founder Etienne Camuzet acquired 3 hectares of the house's flagship Clos Vougeot as well as the Château itself before donating it to the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin. After WWII, the estate came to the management of Jean Méo who had agreements with vintners managing the vineyards and making the wines, the most famous of which was Henri Jayer. In 1983, the estate started to bottle some of its fruits under its own label and the sharecropping agreements eventually came to an end in 1988 when Jean-Nicolas Méo took over the management of the 17.2-hectare property. The meticulous work in the vineyard involves bud pruning in spring, careful trellising to ensure an optimal leaf exposure to sunlight as well as aeration of the bunches and green harvest may be performed if necessary. After harvest bunches are de-stemmed before a 3-5 days cold maceration prior to fermentation. The wines are then matured in oak barrels for 15 to 18 months before bottling. The winemaking aims at preserving the fruit purity to craft smoothly grained, profound wines with complex aromatics and silky textures. In order to ensure the quality acquired in the vineyard and revealed in the cellar is bottled unspoilt, the wines are not filtered. Jean-Nicolas Méo is also involved in a négociant activity which sources and vinifies grapes from vineyards managed by the estate before bottling them under the "Frère & Soeur" label. The attention to detail in the vineyards and the winery is the same as for the estate and allows the family to produce a wider range of appellation in lesser-known Côte de Nuits villages such as Marsannay or Fixin offering a great entry point to the wines of the domaine. Since 2011, this superb portfolio now comprises the first ever Grand Cru white produced by Méo-Camuzet: a Corton-Charlemagne.
1998(2)1999(2)2002(1)2003(1)2004(1)
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