Domaine Raveneau Chablis Montée de Tonnerre: 1985-2015

BY STEPHEN TANZER | AUGUST 13, 2019

Raveneau and Dauvissat. Dauvissat and Raveneau. While most Chablis lovers have a favorite, virtually all of them agree that these two outstanding estates are at the top of the Chablis pecking order—and have been there for decades. They have a lot in common, including superb premier and grand cru vineyard holdings built up over time, assiduous work in the vineyards, a traditional approach to vinification, and élevage mostly in used oak barrels—not to mention their unusually dense, deep, site-inflected wines with uncommon mineral energy and staying power. The two cellars are around the corner from each other in the center of the town of Chablis, and the two families are linked by marriage. They are also the subjects of my first two Chablis verticals for Vinous.

I began in late April with an extensive tasting of the Raveneau family’s top premier cru Montée de Tonnerre, staged for me by the newest generation of Raveneaus: Isabelle Raveneau, daughter of Bernard Raveneau, who has steadily taken over winemaking duties since joining the domain in 2010, and her first cousin Maxime, son of Jean-Marie Raveneau, who just joined the estate in 2017. As it turned out, tasting with Isabelle encouraged me to take a fresh look at the Raveneau wines, which I have been relishing since before Isabelle was born in 1983.

A message to the old-timers who still yearn for the penetratingly dry, steely, borderline-painful Chablis wines of a generation or more ago: get over it. The climate has changed, and it’s hard to find anyone in the sleepy village of Chablis who would rather return to the bad old days. “So far, global warming has been good for us,” is the way Isabelle described it to me two months before this summer’s record heat wave at the end of June.

Maxime and Isabelle Raveneau in their cellar

The History of a Great Estate

Domaine François Raveneau was founded in 1948 when François Raveneau consolidated his holdings with vineyard parcels owned by his wife’s family (Andrée was the sister of René Dauvissat, the father of Vincent). Chablis was a depressing place following World War II: it had essentially been a zone in slow decline since phylloxera, through two world wars and the Great Depression. Earlier in its history, Chablis had enjoyed centuries of popularity, owing to its proximity to Paris (wine could easily be shipped there on the river) and to its popularity in the English market, but the development of France’s train network in the late 19th century subjected Chablis to greater competition from more southerly regions with far less expensive wines. In fact, between its peak in the 19th century and the 1950s, total vineyard acreage in the greater Chablis region declined by 98%! By the 1950s, barely 500 hectares of vines remained.

And even those remaining hectares of vines vexed their owners. The extreme northerly position of the Chablis region, which is located roughly half-way between Paris and Beaune, subjected it to brutal winters, followed by the constant risk of destructive spring frosts and the challenge of getting the fruit ripe enough to make palatable wines. With the harvest normally taking place in October, if not into early November, cold, rainy weather—and even frost—was always a possibility at the end of the season.

Economic conditions were so bad that François Raveneau’s father actually sold some of his best vineyards prior to 1948. The 1950s brought more hardship for the fledgling estate, with the 1957 crop decimated by May frost, and mediocre-to-poor-quality harvests in 1951, 1954, 1956 and 1958. But with great courage and foresight, François made strategic purchases of prime parcels through the 1960s and 1970s, including a couple of favored climats that were virtually unknown at the time, such as the premier cru Chapelot, situated low on the Montée de Tonnerre slope.