2021 Chablis Valmur Grand Cru

Isabelle Raveneau was on hand to guide me through the Domaine's 2022s in barrel and a selection of 2021s in bottle. As usual, she had prepared a ‘table for one’ so that I could sit and type comfortably. “For us, 2022 was nothing special - everything went smoothly,” she tells me, which must have come as a relief after the tumult throughout the previous season. “The only thing was the lack of rain during the summer. We were expecting to pick very early, but the lack of water stopped grape maturity. We started picking quite early on September 1. The yields are normal, but I found the concentration of sugar and acidity interesting, similar to 2020, when we began on August 28. The berries were really healthy [in 2022], but there was not a lot of juice in the press. We decided to keep the same pressing levels as we didn’t want to extract too much bitterness. We just wanted nice juice. I didn’t buy more barrels than usual and reused some that were empty for six months and kept in a humid environment, fermenting inside them so that they weren’t empty for too long. The wines that fermented in tank were left to age there, so I used the same amount of barrels. The alcohol levels are between 12.5% and 13.0%.” With that, she laments that she has to forego a summer vacation as she is rebuilding her house. She admits delight in demolishing walls, perhaps getting rid of any frustration at seeing the eyewatering sums that her wines sell for on the secondary market. Take a cursory glance at restaurant lists in Chablis to see how reasonable ex-cellar tariffs are. One thing she cannot be frustrated about is the caliber of their 2022s. These are two strong vintages for Raveneau, perhaps the Les Vaillons and Montée de Tonnerre transcending their terroirs. Their 2022s have real depth and texture; they’re not steely or linear, which has never been their style. But they are imbued with genuine complexity with subtle traces of exotic fruit that do not detract from their typicité and have the propensity to mature magnificently in bottle. I am inclined to suggest that their 2021s might mature better than their 2022s…we will see.

"Like everyone else in 2021 we had problems with the spring frost when we lost 35-40%,” Isabelle Raveneau told me, once I had overcome the obstacle course outside their office, groundwork for a cobbled new road outside the new Cité du Vin center. “When we prune areas that are prone to frost, we do it in two stages just in case. It remained cold and humid during the summer with a lot of rain before harvest. We just kept losing crop throughout the season. At the end, we are 50% down in average, but in some places it's 75% and others 20-25%. Petit Chablis was hit hard as it is on the plateau. For the Chablis Village that is just behind Montmains, it was OK, but Vaillons and Les Butteaux were pretty badly affected. We started picking on 21 September as there was high rot pressure. The vinification was normal, and we had to chaptalize by around half a degree, so they will end up at around 12.5%. Otherwise, we made sure we kept the fine lees after the first racking. The wines are due to be bottled next spring.” Asking how she interprets the style of 2021, she answers: “Maybe it is back to an eighties style with less sugar and slightly higher acidity, but because of the rain, it’s not really acidic. But it is completely different from 2019 and 2020 when we had hot and dry summers.”