| Score: |
97 WA.
"The 2014 Les Chalasses Marnes Bleues followed the path and the style of the rest of the 2014 whites: austere, vertical, mineral, tasty, long and a little hard with that Ganevat nose of wet chalk, pollen and white flowers, faintly perfumed and insinuating. The palate is sharp, pungent, with effervescent minerality and with great purity, focus and symmetry. Again, this is very young and should only improve in bottle, and it should do it for a long time. I had a crazy visit with Jean-François ‘Fanfan’ Ganevat (as always), a six-hour tasting marathon, moving from one small cellar to the next, starting with the just-fermented 2017s, the 2016s in barrel, the 2015 whites about to be bottled and then the main bottlings of 2014 whites and 2015 reds. It was impossible to capture all the wines, but he did provide some good insight into the latest vintages, at least in the south of the Jura, where his cellars are located, in the village of Rotalier. 2017 was a complete disaster, as he lost some 90% of the normal crop to frost, and there are only two foudres of red and three of white from the total 14 hectares of the Domaine. ‘I will have a lot of Vin de France from purchased grapes,’ he told me, ‘and additionally, some of my wines are rejected by the appellation of origin.’ I tasted reds produced with Gamay from Beaujolais, Syrah from Côte Rôtie and even Pinot Noir from Volnay, but according to Ganevat, ‘they will not carry those appellations on their labels.’ I found the Volnay extremely elegant and full of character, while the Côte Rôtie was so different from the wines of the region, very light, fresh and with very high acidity, that it was impossible to recognize it as such. On the contrary, he was very excited with 2015, which he called ‘the best vintage I've produced in almost 20 years. The wines have an unusual combination of power and acidity, and I have whites with close to 15% alcohol, completely disguised by a pH of 3.0!’ The whites were about to be bottled, and he insisted that I taste them, saying, ‘I'm going to bottle them in two weeks, and they are going to be released soon. If you don't get the information now, it will be too late.’ I hope to be able to taste them again next time with some time in bottle, as what I saw (including an otherworldly 2007 Vignes de Mon Père) was amazing. He even made me taste the 2015 Château Chalon, which got me really confused, as that's a wine that will not be released until at least 2022, but he wanted to show me how ‘ready’ and balanced the wine felt already. It displayed incredible finesse; it’s a wine that they don’t know how they are going to handle, as they are as surprised as me about the evolution of the wine and how good it’s showing so young! The bottled whites were from 2014, a vintage with high acidity, and some could be considered edgy, even hard wines, austere, cold and mineral...that I love. ‘The 2016s will be something in between 2014 and 2016,’ he told me as we moved from cellar to cellar to taste different cuvées from different years. All of a sudden, he got a call and I could hear that he was talking about music, so he explained how he has installed a music system in the vineyards and that plays classical music to the vines, very relaxed music (Mozart and so on), and the result is that the vines are healthier and suffer less attacks of plagues and diseases. When he saw my skeptic's face, he told me he didn't believe it either until he tried it! Crazy!!" Luis Gutiérrez, Wine Advocate #234, Dec 2017 |