The 1996 Chevalier-Montrachet from Domaine d'Auvenay is mindboggling. Fresh, lively, and perfumed aromas of minerals, spicy oak, and touches of candied orange rinds give way to a velvety, full-bodied, massively ripe, and hugely concentrated personality. This wine's purity, precision, delineation, and focus render its citrus fruit-infused minerality almost lace-like. At present a touch austere, it possesses unbridled power, intensity, and concentration of fruit. It should hit its stride around 2010, and last until well past 2020.
Kudos for Mme. Leroy for producing such a majestic range of white Burgundies.
For those readers already interested in the 1997 vintage, Mme. Leroy allowed me to taste her 1997 Chevalier-Montrachet (her malos were already completed in January and she felt the wines were ready to be bottled). It is, as she put it so eloquently, "a grandiose wine without the breeding of 1986, 1989, 1992, 1995, or 1996." Plump, tropical fruit-laden, and opulent, it will be a wine to drink while waiting for more structured vintages to evolve.
If I were still in college, I would visit my professor of ethics to debate the wisdom of spending hundreds of dollars for a bottle of wine that may not be at its peak for 15 years after the vintage. My sense is that after an hour or so of spirited discussion we would come to the banal conclusion that rather than taste, discipline, and passion, one's discretionary income was the critical factor. These wines are astronomically expensive and will require considerable age before attaining their respective peaks. Ideally, enormously wealthy wine lovers will acquire them for their children to enjoy (Mme. Bize-Leroy boldly said "I fully expect my white 1996s to remain youthful for fifty years.").
Whereas other producers covered me with explanations as to why high yields were acceptable in 1996, Lalou Bize-Leroy averaged 15 hectoliters/hectare on her whites, less than one third the yields she could have taken. A self-proclaimed non-interventionist, she told me "all the oenologists told me to deacidify my wines in 1996. To me it is a crime, akin to de-boning a man. Wine is life." Leroy, who says she always harvests late in order to gain additional ripeness, only chaptalised one of her 1996s, the Chevalier-Montrachet (2 kilograms of sugar per barrel). None of these offerings were fined or filtered. Consequently, they are already throwing a deposit.
Importers: Martine's Wines, Inc., San Rafael, CA; tel (415) 485-1800.
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