2001 L'Évangile

The temperature in the vines reached 110 degrees in August, said manager Jean-Pascal Vazart, and the leaves dried out and fell off. "But the vines on clay produced superb fruit, not at all cooked and with no loss of elegance. It's not a superripe, hot wine, like one might imagine." In fact, Vazart summarized, "the young 2003 has the freshness of '99 and '01 with the fine-grained tannins of 2000. It's certainly un millesime a part L'Evangile started picking on September 1 but, according to Vazart, devoted the first couple of days to "cleaning up the bad stuff." The harvest was over by September 11. The vinifications were easy, Vazart went on. "We worked more like the Medocaines, extracting quickly at the beginning and then stopping our extraction. But we still did a relatively long cuvaison By the middle of October everything was racked, sulfited and in the barrel. In fact the wine has already had more than five months in new oak but it doesn't show it because it has enough structure to support the wood."

Manager Jean-Pascal Vazart, who took over here in August, will be overseeing the renovation of the entire property over the next year or two. There is now a vibrating table de trie before the grapes are crushed and another sorting table afterwards; by vintage 2003, the estate will be able to move the fruit into tanks without pumping it (by then L'Evangile will also be using the new-style squat cuves that provide a better exchange between the juice and the skins, thus facilitating gentler and easier extraction). Leaf-pulling and eclaircissage are now systematic here. Vazart told me the skins were actually a bit tougher in 2001 than in the previous year, without the surmaturite that characterized 2000. Unfortunately, I was not able to retaste the 2000, as it was being fined.