94+

Stephen Tanzer

Vinous

Deep red-ruby. Pure but tight aromas of dark raspberry, brown spices and graphite. Dense, fat and rich but quite youthfully reduced, showing notes of smoke and toast. This amazingly chewy and tactile wine needs a lot of patience. Sullen today but very long and strong on the back end, with a powerful impression of dry extract and a finishing note of chocolate. If you invest in a wine like this, don't even think of opening it any time soon (Jeremy Seysses suggests waiting 12 years).

96

David Schildknecht

Robert Parker/Wine Advocate

The Seysses’ 2005 Clos de la Roche charts new territory in this collection for sheer intensity. Black cherry, kirsch distillate, cedar, incense, iron filings, wet stone, and roasted meats and coffee represent a few of the immediate aromatic suggestions forced on this taster. In the mouth, it is similarly compelling, with an eruption of clear black cherry, cassis, and meat juices, faintly bitter notes of fruit skin and pungent herbal and mineral notes adding complexity. The texture is incipiently velvety, imposingly glossy, and a perfect cover for fine, abundant tannins. Spectacularly rich and reverberative in its multifaceted finish, this sensational wine deserves at least a decade of rest before re-opening. The already rich array of crus at Domaine Dujac has recently been augmented on two fronts. The purchase (along with de Montille) of the Societe Civile du Clos de Thorey (Thomas-Moillard) has brought them a raft of choice parcels including three new grand cru holdings (for a staggering total of eight). Meanwhile, they have expanded their negociant arm (with control over harvest and green harvest a prerequisite) to supplement in particular their volumes of village-level wine. (Those wines – labeled “Dujac Fils & Pere” – are signified in the above listing with “FP”. In fact, due to a legal technicality, the 2005 vintage wines from the properties newly acquired by the domaine – but not subsequent vintages – will also read “Fils & Pere” rather than “Domaine”.) Even with California-trained oenologist Diana Seysses (nee Snowden) joining her husband Jeremy and in-laws Jacques and Alec, and with a new winery (though at the old address) I wonder at how they are able to keep up with the magnitude of their responsibilities. Yet despite so many parcels and vines new to them this year, the results are consistently outstanding and at times astounding. Much of the vinification – increasingly as one goes up the hierarchy of crus – was of whole clusters. Malos finished (finally) by November and the wines were bottle in December and January.