The domaine-bottled Fevre 2008 Chablis adds chicken stock, fusil crushed stone, and shrimp shell dimensions (even in the nose) to the simpler chalk and salt that dominated their Champ Royaux and Petit Chablis cuvees. Tart yet lusciously refreshing white currant and grapefruit offer the perfect stage for the wine’s complex mineral show, and there is a back-end grip and energy here that are admirable for a wine of village origin. Like all of the wines in this year’s Fevre collection, it has undeniably high acid, and the degree of buffering here is not comparable to that in the estate’s premier crus, so this wine will strike some tasters as somewhat severe.
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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