Nuits St Georges Boudots 1er Cru 2018

The 2018 Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru Aux Boudots wafts from the glass with aromas of sweet spices, berry fruit, rich soil tones, rose petals and orange rind. Medium to full-bodied, velvety and textural, it's broad and charming, with ripe tannins, succulent acids and an expansive finish. I first visited Maxim Cheurlin at Domaine Georges Noëllat as a graduate student. In those early days, Maxime's wines were supple and immediate, undergoing a comparatively rapid malolactic fermentation in the warm, only partially subterranean cellars located beneath his residence. Demonstratively delicious during élevage, they were head-turning and accessible. But then, in 2015, he installed air-conditioning, and everything changed. Cheurlin now delays malolactic fermentation for the better part of a year, chilling his cellars, and the wines evolve much more slowly: he only finished bottling his 2018s in July. Given the cellar's new rhythm, I asked that we taste bottled 2018s rather than 2019s that had only just finished malolactic fermentation, and that's how I'll be covering this producer in the future. The new style chez Cheurlin is decidedly more serious and reserved, more saturated in color and more tightly wound, and these 2018s were very promising. It will be fascinating to track their evolution with bottle age.

Score: 93

William Kelley, Wine Advocate, RobertParker.com Maturity: 2026-46 14 January 2021