There is only a barrel and a half of Bouchard 2006 Batard Montrachet. It smells of lemon and talcum; coats the palate with viscous, rich, almost liqueur-like essence of ripe peach along with malt and toasted nut paste; and finishes with fine length if not (at least at the stage I caught it) the complexity of the very best wines of this year’s collection. With around one-third of that great grand cru (spread along four terraces), Bouchard has the liberty of bottling two dramatically different wines from Chevalier-Montrachet. In keeping with what he says are his usual intuitions, Philippe Prost picked early – bringing in Chardonnay ahead of Pinot Noir for the first time at Bouchard since 1989 – so as to retain freshness as well as what he termed “the sense of minerality in a vintage of very ripe fruit. But in 1989,” he hastens to add, “yields were perhaps overly generous, whereas in 2006 they are quite reasonable.” The results are consistently impressive. New barrels are generally “seasoned” here through use in wines of lesser appellation (other portions of which are frequently raised in tank), as Prost prefers to employ second year barrels for most of his crus. Injections of inert gas at bottling are among the techniques being used to protect the young wines here from oxidation. Importer: Henriot, Inc, New York, NY