1999 Châteauneuf-du-Pape Chaupin

Christophe Sabon has been doing most of his malolactic fermentations in barriques and foudres for the past three or four years. The fruit now is drained by gravity from the concrete vats into the barrel cellar. Sabon keeps the lees with the wine, stirring if the wines become reduced. Racking is kept to a minimum: generally during the winter after the vintage and then again for the bottling. Sabon did a solid month of cuvaison for his 2000s; "the skins were very thick, and I needed to do a lot of pigeage to break the skins and get the sugar," he explained. I tasted the 2000s out of cuve where they had been, in Sabon's words, 90% assembled.

Christophe Sabon claims that there little difference in quality between '98 and '99. "Six months ago I preferred '98, but the '99 astonishes me every day," he explained. "The grapes seemed less ripe at the start, and the wines began more closed, but the vintage has more acidity and today the wines seem almost better than the '98s." I tasted "pre-selections" of Sabon's '99s recently assembled in cuves where they will remain until the bottling in April. But Sabon typically keeps some syrah or mourvedre in barriques for longer levage and he told me there's always the chance he will tweak some of his cuvees between now and the bottling. Sabon still does a light egg white fining as well as a light filtration. "I'm not a fanatic of non-filtration," he explained. "A light filtration refines the wines, makes them less reduced, less animal."