2008 Chablis Vieilles Vignes
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Didier Picq told me that he never took longer to harvest than he did in 2009. "I started on September 15 and finished on September 30, but we really only picked on seven different days," he told me. It's worth noting that Picq uses wild yeasts, which can take a good six weeks to finish fermentations. While wild yeast fermentations are common at the best Cote de Beaune estates, many Chablis producers inoculate with commercial yeasts and thus get much faster fermentations. Picq describes his 2009 crop of wines as "a classic, rich style, a bit like 2006. It's 2003 that's atypical here." He believes that the 2009s will be easy to drink. Picq said that he doesn't plan to do his first bottling of 2009 until September. To make the point that his wines age (his first harvest was 1989), Picq opened a bottle of the basic 1994 village wine, which he noted did not include the addition of the old-vines juice. It was very much a point, with no shortage of energy.
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Didier Picq assembles his village parcels early on, but then ages them in tank and does three or four different bottlings over a period of time. For example, he had just bottled a batch of the 2008 for the U.S. market and planned to do another bottling in November; the last mise for the 2007 village wine had taken place in March of this year. The challenge for the visiting wine critic is that it's impossible to know for sure whether various tanks will be bottled separately or combined, so I have refrained from publishing notes on the 2008 village samples below (except for an early bottling earmarked for the U.S. market). Picq enjoyed a calm 2008 growing season (many of his parcels were hit by hailstorms in 2007), bringing in fruit with potential alcohol between 12.2% and 12.8% and chaptalizing the less-rich cuvees a half-degree or so. The long alcoholic fermentations, which ended here in January, resulted in richer wines, and Picq noted that the 2008s have plenty of material to envelop their sound acidity, which he said was close to five grams per liter in most of his wines.