Domaine Dugat-Py Gevrey Chambertin Vieilles Vignes 2018

The 2018 Gevrey-Chambertin Les Evocelles is immensely promising this year, unfurling in the glass with complex aromas of wild blueberries, cassis, dark chocolate and coniferous forest floor. On the palate, it's medium to full-bodied, deep and concentrated, with lively acids, rich structuring tannins and a long, penetrating finish. Domaine Dugat-Py owns one hectare of vines in this stony, higher-altitude hillside site, a location that's capable of producing some of Gevrey's finest communal wines, and its potential is fully realized in this cuvée. Loïc Dugat-Py was one of the first to harvest in 2018, beginning on August 29, and he has been rewarded by an exemplary set of wines that numbers among the vintage's very finest. The Dugat-Py 2018 collection, moreover, underlines this domaine's recent evolution. As ever, these are deep and concentrated wines, the product of low yields and old vines, but as has been the case for several years, extraction continues to be gentler. And Loïc has furthermore quietly reduced, once again, the percentage of new oak used here...All of which is to say that, even in the inherently ripe and broad-shouldered 2018 vintage, this is one of the most elegant sets of wines ever to emerge from Domaine Dugat-Py. I encourage readers to put outdated stereotypes of excessive oak and over-extraction to one side and try what is being produced today, as these are bottles that number among the finest that contemporary Burgundy has to offer. (WK)