Lighter and less healthy in color than its 2008 counterpart, Landanger’s 2007 Santenay Les Gravieres displays lightly-cooked strawberry and cherry notes tinged with vanilla and cherry pit, with game and leather notes gaining prominence into its finish. The texture here is tender, and I’d say the equilibrium between fresh fruit and wild animal is attractive but potentially precarious, so as to recommend enjoying this over the next couple of years. Patrick Landanger’s recent vintages seem to reflect increasing confidence (not to mention consistency), displaying a sense of restraint while combining richness and transparency to detail. Between the threat of rot and of roasting, he observes, the 2007s required more rigorous sorting than did the fruit from 2008, with a correspondingly lower crop, but Landanger and his crew did an outstanding job in the face of 2007 adversities as well as in 2008. Importer: Langdon-Shiverick Imports, Cleveland, OH; tel. (216) 861 6800 and a Peter Vezan Selection (various importers), Paris; fax 011 33 1 42 55 42 93