Smoky, fusil crushed chalk and fresh lemon in the nose of Fevre’s 2008 Chablis Les Clos lead to a palate lusciously-brimming with fresh apricot, lemon, and grapefruit, suffused with chalk, white pepper, salt, iodine, green tea, and distilled herbal essences. Exhilarating and rejuvenating, this finishes with a tenacity, vivacity, and tactile presence hard to equal in the vintage. A gripping, ultra-mineral Les Clos, for all of its sheer fruit intensity, it makes no concessions to charm or winsomeness, particularly in its mineral-dominated finish, which some may consider austere. But few will be able to weather this cru’s gutsy intensity unbent, or scour its residues from their gums and lips. I suspect it will be worth following for a good 15 years, but even more than any of the other wines in the 2008 Fevre collection, this should be given a few years in bottle before one gets serious about drinking more than an introductory bottle.
The 2008 collection fielded by Didier Seguier and his team maintains their recent streak of excellence, but in a reversal of vintage typicity, seems, if anything, more dominated by its acidity and minerality than the 2007s, and less effusive than many of its vintage. Between poor flowering and dehydration, the crop was down around 20% in 2008 even from that of its hail-trimmed predecessor. The wines as usual were racked from barrel after malo (which this year, meant in April); some were bottled during the summer but the grand crus and most of the premier crus were bottled last November and December. Several of the wines that I tasted (noted in the text, and of course labeled without the word “domaine”) incorporate purchased fruit, but beginning with this vintage, the Fevre team not only calls the shots but does the picking for all of the grapes that inform wines labeled with their name. Like Hugel in Alsace, Fevre has been impressed enough with the new generation of DIAM composite corks to adopt them for a majority of their bottlings, in fact with this vintage for everything save grand cru – so let’s hope their confidence is well-placed! It perhaps also bears repeating that in my opinion there isn’t a track record for aging yet that one can apply to Fevre’s last three collections, the quality having improved too much to extrapolate with any reliably from previous vintages, so please take my prognoses as intuitive hunches.
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