1997 L'Hermitage

This wine was tasted over dinner at Osteria Francescana, and featured in Vinous Table.

On my recent pilgrimage to this cellar of wonders beneath the drab, gray surface of Mauves, Gerard Chave took great pleasure in telling me that the wines he ultimately puts on the market have little resemblance to those that early barrel tasters describe. After all, the blend he and his son Jean-Louis assemble during the second March is different than any of the elements on their own. "We create a wine that no early taster knows," is how he put it. "Every year we start from zero in assembling the blend." The Chaves don't hesitate to sell off components that don't fit into the blend; in fact, they don't know the quantity of wine they'll be able to offer until the assemblage is made. The '98 vintage brought the smallest crop at this address in 20 years: some of the Chaves' lieux-dit yielded just 15-20 hectoliters per hectare. (Crop levels were literally twice as high in the copious '99 harvest, by the way.) Quality was more regular in '98 than in '97, reports Jean-Louis Chave; although the raw materials show a more classic structure than in '97, he notes, the skins were actually riper than those of the previous year.

This is a vintage "at the extreme of richness," says Gerard Chave about 1997. The red Hermitage will be fat and multilayered, while the white will be one of the top examples made here in the last 20 years. Despite healthy yields roughly the same as those of the previous year, the white grapes got an almost passerille concentration in '97, said Chave, who was cagey about the possibility of some sort of special white wine cuvee being made this year. These very rich wines fermented slowly, with some cuvees not finishing until late last summer. "Did you block the malolactic fermentation in the '97?" I asked. "Never," replied Chave; "When you block the malo the wine never develops the same interesting secondary and tertiary aromas--the malic acidity blocks these aromas." For the long-term development of this wine in bottle, adds Chave, gras and glycerol will take the place of acidity. Gerard and Jean-Louis Chave also staged a remarkable vertical tasting for me in early December, the results of which will be published in an upcoming issue.