2000 Rol Valentin

Eric Prissette noted that his five hectares of vines yielded just 22 hectoliters per hectare in 2002, as the flowering on his 1.8-hectare sand-and-clay parcel was especially difficult. He harvested his cabernet franc (10% of the blend) until October 17. Prissette did a 15-day fermentation in his small wood cuves, then another 23 days of maceration on the skins, at 30oC. Prissette told me he sent a team into the vines during the second half of September to eliminate the less ripe berries - an extremely labor-intensive step that most chateau cannot afford to do. Among the five lots I sampled, the old merlot vines on the clay-and-chalk St. Etienne de Lys plateau produced particularly mouthstaining wine, offering an enticing combination of inner-mouth floral character and sheer energy. My note on the 2002 is for an approximation of the final blend.

"We had all the elements of a strong wine in 2001," said proprietor/winemaker Eric Prissette, "but we needed to do a lot of work to get precision and balance." Extraction is softer here than it was even two years ago, and Prissette now has 11 small cuves for his 4.6 hectares of vines - "one cuve for each day of picking, which enables us to harvest with greater precision." Prissette picked his cabernet sauvignon on October 17, keeping only the equivalent of 17 hectoliters per hectare and eliminating the less-ripe fruit. This is one of several right-bank wines that strike me as especially Burgundian in character.

Proprietor Eric Prissette, formerly a professional soccer player, purchased a number of new open-top Taransaud fermenters for the 2000 vintage, some as tiny as 1,000 liters, to harvest and vinify with greater precision. (The various lots in 2000 were concentrated via saignee, by as little as 5% to as much as 20%.) This new wine (the first serious commercial release was 1998, although Prissette started here in 1994) is made mostly from merlot, but there about 15% cabernet sauvignon and franc. Prissette now owns 4-1/2 hectares: two around the house, with sandy soils similar to those of La Dominique, and the rest in the hamlet of Bel-Air in St. Etienne de Lisse, close to the new parcel recently bought by Jean-Luc Thunevin and now being used to produce Valandraud. Prissette told me he looks for "precision of flavor, soft tannins, tendresse: "I don't do a lot of extraction, and the wines are racked only two times prior to bottling." The 2000 received 200% new oak treatment, as it was vinified in the new fermenters and then racked into new barriques, 60% of which are from Taransaud.