Jean-Michel Guillon Gevrey Chambertin Les Crais 2010

Jean-Michel Guillon arrived in Gevrey-Chambertin in 1980, a former military pilot with no winemaking pedigree, and built a roughly 15-hectare domaine famous for its appetite for new barrels: by trade accounts, only the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and the Hospices de Beaune buy more new French oak in Burgundy. Les Crais is a village lieu-dit whose gravelly limestone soils bring lift and mineral tension to Gevrey's darker register, and in the Guillon cellar it gets the emphatic house treatment, deep extraction and élevage in new oak aimed squarely at longevity. The 2010 now carries more than fifteen years of bottle age, exactly the patience this style asks for. Gevrey with the volume turned up, settled into maturity.