2017 Alain Hudelot-Noellat, Richebourg Grand Cru

Robert Parker's Wine Advocate

The king of the cellar is the 2017 Richebourg Grand Cru, a brooding wine that unfurls in the glass with notes of raspberries, candied peel, exotic spice, Asian plum sauce, dark chocolate and rose petals. On the palate, the wine is full-bodied, satiny and concentrated, its fine structuring tannins entirely cloaked in fruit, displaying more depth and incipient complexity than the Romanée-Saint-Vivant, concluding with a long, succulent and beautifully delineated finish. This is a very compelling Richebourg from the talented Charles Van Canneyt. This is a successful vintage for Charles Van Canneyt at Domaine Hudelot-Noëllat. The wines are supple and charming, gaining in-depth, seriousness and complexity as one ascends the hierarchy of appellations and vine age. After the concentrated and compelling 2015s and 2016s, both vintages built for the cellar despite their decidedly different styles, 2017 represents a high quality but more immediate, structurally open-knit year for the Domaine, and for impatient consumers, that is no bad thing. The domaine's roster of appellations will be familiar to readers by now, with the exception of a promising new Meursault from the lieu-dit Clos des Ecoles—a parcel formerly farmed by the Domaine Coche-Dury. (WK) 93-95