Domaine Leflaive Chevalier-Montrachet: 1981-2012
BY STEPHEN TANZER |
Domaine Leflaive, the most famous wine address in Puligny-Montrachet, has a glorious track record for bottling seamless, elegant terroir-driven wines with class and staying power thanks to their firm but harmonious acid/mineral spines. I had the extraordinary opportunity one sunny afternoon this past spring to taste 23 vintages of Domaine Leflaive’s splendid Chevalier-Montrachet with Brice de la Morandière, the great-grandson of the estate’s founder Joseph Leflaive, who took over direction of the estate following the untimely passing of his aunt Anne-Claude Leflaive in 2015 at the age of 59.
Morandière told me that he had at least two motives for staging the tasting. First, I had been bugging him about it for nearly a year, although I would have been perfectly happy to have tasted one of the estate’s top Premier Crus or its Grand Crus Bâtard-Montrachet or Bienvenues-Bâtard. Second, Morandière had heard what he described as a disturbing comment three years ago at a tasting in New York, when a consumer expressed displeasure with the condition of a bottle of the estate’s 1986 Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles, which the taster thought was prematurely oxidized despite the fact that it was 30 years old at the time. When I asked Morandière if he thought that it was unfair for drinkers to expect even the best Premier Cru white Burgundies to age impeccably for 30 years, his response was quite charitable under the circumstances. He simply said: “Every decade of a white Burgundy’s life is different, and should be different.”
In fact, then, Morandière’s primary goal in presenting his Chevalier-Montrachet was to demonstrate how a white Burgundy evolves over time—by showing vintages back to the 1989. “We hoped to show in the tasting that aged white Burgundies are fantastic, but for different reasons than what we like in younger wines,” Morandière explained. “The peak drinking window for a given wine is highly personal. But you should expect something different every decade. Younger wines are different from older wines, but a lot of tasters drink mostly young wines and look for those characteristics in older wines. But tertiary aromas are the fun of mature wines.”
A Very Brief History of Domaine Leflaive
The Leflaive family has been established as winemakers in Puligny-Montrachet since 1717. But Domaine Leflaive was created in 1910 by Joseph Leflaive (a maritime engineer who was involved in the design and construction of France’s first submarine), using five acres of vines inherited from his family in 1905. In fairly short order, Leflaive expanded his estate to nearly 50 acres by buying up choice parcels of land in Chevalier-Montrachet, Bâtard-Montrachet, Bienvenues-Bâtard-Montrachet and the Premier Crus Les Pucelles and Clavoillon, as many vineyard owners were selling their land in the aftermath of the phylloxera epidemic of the late 19th century.
Following Joseph’s death in 1953, his four children elected to keep the family estate intact, with brothers Vincent and Joseph-Régis running the property together. (It was Vincent who acquired a tiny parcel of Le Montrachet in 1991, enough to make a single barrique of wine.) Joseph-Régis’s son Olivier helped his uncle Vincent run the estate from 1982 to 1990, and in 1990 Vincent’s daughter Anne-Claude Leflaive and Olivier became co-directors. By that point, Olivier had begun to build his own négociant business and with the death of Vincent Leflaive in 1993, Anne-Claude took over direction of the family domain. Olivier left to devote full time to his merchant business.
