1998 L'Hermitage

Since my last visit, the Chaves have installed a state-of-the-art system enabling them to control the temperature of the various rooms of their cellar independently. Other than that, the gloomy cellars beneath their house in Mauves have changed little in the last century or so. The wines, not surprisingly, are as spectacularly fine as ever. As characterized by Jean-Louis Chave, 1999 featured a growing season without climatic shocks, and the steady maturation of the grapes has yielded a wine of great balance. "In 1998, the challenge was to find the glycerol and gras to buffer the tannins, while in '99, because the component wines were much rounder, it was easier to make an assemblage " Jean-Louis noted. Although the quality of the '99 vintage surely merits a special Cuvee Cathelin bottling, the Chaves had not yet made a final determination in November. Given the nature of the vintage, it possible that the most structured, firmly tannic components of '99 juice will be needed to give the overall blend the backbone and grip for long-term ageability. Incidentally, the Chaves will release small quantities of their first Vin de Paille since 1990 after they bottle the '96 sometime in the coming months. Coincidentally, the extraordinary '96, with its honeyed yet utterly vibrant aromas and flavors of orange zest and marmalade, resembles the '90 in style, while the still-fermenting (!) '97, with its gamier, more liqueur-like character and uncanny thickness and sucrosity, more closely resembles the incredible '89.

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.