Winemaker Notes
"Les Pruliers" has a sustained color. Young, it imposes its personality. Summer fruit flavors mingle with fine plant smells reminiscent of blackcurrant leaves, with licorice and spicy rose notes in the background. When mature: fullness and roundness, underlined with a dash of liveliness, that try to hide more austere closing notes. Flavors of cocoa, smoked meat, and undergrowth are then noticed. In great years, age gives it a generous and sensual sweetness.
Professional Ratings
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Jasper Morris
Just as dark in colour but there is more life in the nose, dark fruits but still more in the red register than black. Just spent a mite longer in the oven than is ideal. Ripe bright cheerful cherry notes and a long aftertaste. Enough juice here for this to work.
Barrel Sample: 91-94 -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2020 Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru Les Pruliers is showing especially well, soaring from the glass with notes of raspberries, cherries, sweet spices, raw cocoa and orange rind. Medium to full-bodied, bright and vibrant, with lively acids and a deep core of concentrated fruit, it's framed by ripe, powdery tannins and concludes with a long, penetrating finish.
Barrel Sample: (92-94)+ -
Vinous
The 2020 Nuits Saint-Georges Les Pruliers 1er Cru has a powerful bouquet of graphite-infused black fruit and freshly rolled tobacco. The palate is medium-bodied and quite fresh with fine balance and salinity.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
Inhabiting the bottom end of the northern half of the Côte d’Or, Nuits-St-Georges is a busy, market-driven town and home to many of Burgundy’s negociants. It is also the largest town in the Côte d’Or after Beaune and contributes "nuits" to the name of Côte de Nuits (i.e., the northern half of the Côte d’Or).
The appellation itself is divided into two parts, where in the north it directly borders Vosne-Romanée, the southerly end is the commune of Prémeaux. There are no Grands Crus in this village, though it does have a large number of Premiers Crus.
The best Nuits-St-Georges Pinot Noir are layered with cherry, plum, underbrush and sandalwood. The fruit is sweet, the wine energetic, and the finish long and lush.