2006 Macon Villages Cuvee Levroutee

The 2006 Viré-Clessé Cuvée Levroutée is a spectacular wine that's still an adolescent at age 13. Unfurling in the glass with notes of mandarin oil, dried white flowers, musky peach, Curaçao, beeswax and gingerbread, it's full-bodied, deep and multidimensional, with a satiny attack, a concentrated, structured core and a long, complex and spice-inflected finish. It's a singular wine, produced with around 20% botrytized grapes and vinfied in the same manner as the Thevenet's other wines. The 2006 is better balanced and more integrated than the 2005 and will be longer lived: it's only just being released, and another two decades wouldn't surprise me. Readers should be prepared for something very different from just about anything else produced in Burgundy.