1997 Châteauneuf-du-Pape Chaupin

"So what's new here since my last visit?" I asked Christophe Sabon on a sunny Saturday morning in late November. "Here's my big recent investment," he responded, holding up a spindly pigou bourguignon a stainless steel rake he has used since 1996 to do manual pigeage. In fact, improvements here in recent years have been mostly in viticultural practice: Sabon does more work in the vines than ever before, including routine green-harvesting and lots of leaf pulling, "especially in humid years like 1997, in order to get riper grapes." Green-harvesting in 9 of his 13 hectares of Chateauneuf du Pape vines kept yields to just 30 hectoliters per hectare in '98, and helped Sabon make his most impressive set of wines to date-"certainly much richer than the '95s," he notes. Sabon is a flexible vinifier who seeks to preserve fruit rather than look for early animal character ("that will come"); he likes aromas of surmaturite but does not want to bottle wines with residual sugar. Sabon vinifies and ages as many as 60 different parcels, putting the wines in wood early for the malolactic fermentation, then aging them in a combination of foudres and barriques, some new. The wines are assembled only in the weeks leading up to the bottling. Sabon won't begin bottling his '98s until April. Don't miss Sabon's Cotes du Rhone bottlings, especially the one labelled Les Garrigues, remarkably fresh and creamy-rich in '97 and even denser and more vivacious in 1998. The wine is from low-yielding grenache vines planted on soil covered by the same large round stones (galets roules) found across much of the northern portion of the Chateauneuf du Pape appellation.