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95 WA.
"We tasted a sample of the potential Château Chalon from 2013 that was still years from being bottled but already showed the finesse that made the appellation famous, and the one sous-voile wine I tasted was the 2008 Vin Jaune. This wine was poured from a 375-milliliter bottle in the shape of a clavelin—the 620-milliliter bottle used for Vin Jaune—but the crazy regulations for Vin Jaune stipulate that it 375-milliliter bottle cannot be sold in Europe, and the clavelin is illegal in the US! Anyway, this was tasted straight after the 2008 Les Vignes de Mon Père, which made it incredibly hard to taste, as I was still levitating from the previous wine . . . . Good depth. This has the classical nose of Savagnin aged for more than six years under a veil of yeasts, with notes of curcuma, dried morels, green almonds, pollen, and saffron. The palate feels light but has very good depth, and this wine might feel light when young and seem to put on weight with time in bottle. It is clean and precise. A visit chez Ganevat is a rollercoaster ride. This time, we started at 4 p.m. and finished at 2 a.m. after a stratospheric 1929 Vin Jaune (which, tasted blind, I guessed as early 1960s or 1950s!) and a no-less-impressive 1959 Vin de Paille. The tasting always starts with lots of different components for his négoce wines, mostly reds, then the domaine whites and perhaps a handful of bottles. So, I tasted very little from bottle this time, as the 2016s were not bottled yet, and there's hardly any wine from 2017 (only one white and one red) due to the killer frost that decimated the harvest; so, I tasted mostly forthcoming wines, of which the 2008 Vignes de Mon Père looks like a killer and very different from previous years. When we started touring his different cellars with the pipette, glasses and a bucket, the first thing Jean-François told me was that 2018 had been a very good year for reds and less so for whites, which were in a difficult phase and were still fermenting in mid-May. But late and long fermentations don't seem to be a big problem here, as I had seen in previous visits. He compared 2018 to 2003, so it's a ripe year but without reaching the extremes of the 2003 vintage, but some reds reached 14.5% alcohol. We tasted from various tanks, foudres and different containers, including a Poulsard from vines planted in 1938, a Gamay from a vineyard planted by his grandfather and even a Volnay from the 1er Cru Santenots that will obviously have no appellation, as it was vinified in Jura and might even be blended with something else. The tasting included some crazy wines—a blend of old varieties from Jura, a Pinot Gris from Alsace and a Fleury from what seems like a very ripe year in Beaujolais. There are more and more whites from the négoce, and I tasted various components and cuvées, including a super tasty Savagnin macerated with skins for one month that had enough acidity to balance the fine tannins as well as other 2016s, still unbottled, like a Savagnin from the same terroir of Grands Teppes that had a tantalizing nose of tangerine peel and superb length. I also encountered some older whites that were leftover from the bottling, perhaps waiting for flor or God knows what. The 2015 whites were bottled in December 2018 just before Christmas. What follows are the frantic notes scribbled on 20 pages of a small tasting book while we had a running tasting tour of the Ganevat cellars, where some kind of magic certainly goes on." Wine Advocate #243, Jun 2019 |