2015 L'Hermitage

The big news here is that Jean-Louis Chave will, with the 2015 vintage, finally release this historic domain’s first single-vineyard Saint-Joseph and what a wine it is. Made from fruit grown in Chave’s Clos Florentin, in the family’s hometown of Mauves, it is among the top wines of the appellation, to my taste. I’ve tasted it from barrel many times over the years, when it was a component for Chave’s reliably excellent (now “regular”) Saint-Joseph and while Jean-Louis always knew that, someday, it would wind up as a stand-alone wine, it took until the outstanding 2015 vintage for it to actually happen. To call it a must-buy for northern Rhône junkies is an understatement. Almost as big a news is that there is a 2015 Ermitage Cuvée Cathelin bottling, the first one since 2009 and only the seventh made since it debuted with the 1990 vintage.

After suffering through the short crops of 2014 and 2013, Jean-Louis Chave told me that he was relieved to realize a normal crop, “which is always low, anyway, with all the old vines,” in 2015. Even better, he said, was the fact that the fruit was uniformly of extremely high quality—“healthy, ripe and with great natural acidity”—thanks to the cool nights that the region enjoyed, along with some well-timed rain. After showing me numerous barrels of his 2015 Ermitage components, Chave opened a bottle of his 2003 Hermitage (he still added the “H” to the name back then) to demonstrate the contrast between “a really hot-around-the-clock vintage” and those new wines that we’d just tasted. Looking back at my original notes on the 2003 components, I have little doubt that the ’15 here will be more elegant, fresh and precise than the ’03. At this stage it seems to be built more along the lines of Chave’s 2010, but less tannic, or maybe even 2013, but with more weight and with a dose of, say, 2009 thrown in for ripeness. I’ll also add, once again, that the Saint-Joseph here, especially from a great vintage like 2015, delivers remarkably good value for its quality, especially compared to Hermitages of equal quality.