92(+?) Points | International Wine Cellar , November/December 2012

Bright ruby-red.  Red cherry, raspberry syrup and fresh herbs on the perfumed nose.  Creamy and tactile in the mouth, with pure, rich flavors of ripe red berries and cherry supported by fine-grained tannins.  Turns slightly tighter, even a bit austere, on the very long finish, which features lingering smoke and iron notes.  (Deiss told me he finds a taste of blood in this wine.)  All this very impressive, mostly pinot noir red wine needs is a little time.  This wine was first made in 1975, from a vineyard that Jean-Michel Deiss has steadily increased in size via the acquisition of additional parcels of vines over the years.  Deiss also told me that this land is planted at an unbelievably tight spacing of 27,000 vines per hectare, because he wanted to see what the taste of the berries would be when the vines grew hardly any fruit.  According to Deiss, by the way, vineyards at the Abbey of Citeaux in Burgundy were historically planted to a density as high as 75,000 vines per hectare!