The 2012 Chassagne-Montrachet Village comes from around seven or eight different parcels. It has a light bouquet with bruised apple and a touch of melted wax, though it needs a little more delineation. The palate is better, with a touch of sherbet on the entry and decent tension, but the mid-palate is again predictable, even if the finish has a pleasant citric twist, if not the length.
The Leflaive family has been a fixture within Burgundy for over 18 generations since as far back as 1635. When Olivier Leflaive’s father became ill in 1980, he commenced his tenure at Domaine Leflaive with uncle Vincent, the father of Anne-Claude and he remained there until 1994. “I was a little...bored,” Olivier admits, his trademark cowhide hat rested upon the table. “So in 1985 I created Olivier Leflaive with the help of Vincent and my brother Patrick. I wanted to make wines beyond Puligny and I wanted to make red wines. At the beginning I had no holdings of my own and I was buying in grapes. With the profits I was able to buy vineyards. Now we have around 15 hectares covering 90 different appellations.” Olivier Leflaive has retired from the front line nowadays, though having said that, I suspect that, a bit like Jacques Lardiere ex-Louis Jadot, his heart is too embedded within the domaine to extricate himself completely. His son-in-law Jean Soubeyrand has taken over has director-general and he has a tough job on his hands dealing with a web of contracted growers that occupy another 25 hectares. They have been moving step-by-step toward organic viticulture in recent years, though both Jean and Olivier seemed rather skeptical about biodynamics, even if they agreed that nothing bad can come from it, only good. With challenging vintages fresh in their mind, they want to resort to normal protective sprays when absolutely necessary. Of course, the exceptions are the parcels taken back from Anne-Claude Leflaive in 2009, which they continue to farm biodynamically since they had been handled that way before. Readers should also note that, for the first time, their 2012 whites are bottled under DIAM. They would have required less DIAMs than normal since production plummeted by 50% in 2012, including the complete absence of some of their flagship labels. Olivier Leflaive is an interesting enterprise, very different to that of Anne-Claude Leflaive. Whereas Anne-Claude is devoted – some might say obsessively – to the vineyard and the tenets of Rudolf Steiner (and there is nothing wrong with that if it manifests wondrous wines), Olivier Leflaive’s focus is more upon offering consistency from vintage to vintage – wines that for Burgundy can achieve comparatively high volumes in thousands of cases, not to mention a bustling restaurant and hotel in the heart of Puligny that borrows its marketing style more from the Napa Valley than parochial Burgundy. Chez Olivier Leflaive, tourist are welcome with open arms, as I witnessed for myself as Olivier flitted from table to table during lunch, chatting with guests and posing for the occasional iPhone photo. With respect to the quality of the wines, well, they have never been what you might call “top tier” Burgundy whites, and there has always been a commercial feel to even the top grand crus that might preclude them from the rarefied atmosphere of Anne-Claude or even say, Jacques Carillon, that I visited the same morning. These are the kinds of wines I can imagine been glugged with pleasure in wine bars from New York to London to Tokyo. Discerning oenophiles might eschew them for Anne-Claude’s wines over the road, but then again, not everyone wants to pay the price and not everyone has the means. So while in the cold light of day, my scores might seem parsimonious, there is another part of me, perhaps the more mercantile part, that understands that Olivier Leflaive’s wines fill a niche that other growers do not have the capacity for.
Importer: Frederic Wildman and Corney & Barrow (UK)
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