The Chateau des Jacques 2011 Moulin-a-Vent Clos du Grand Carquelin reveals scents of nutmeg, almond extract, and vanilla as well as lightly cooked ripe cherry. It comes to the palate expansive and rich yet, felicitously, juicy and buoyant as well as possessed of alluringly bitter-sweet and elusive inner-mouth iris perfume. Along with saliva-drawing salinity and savory shrimp shell reduction, the merest hint of caramelization is incorporated in its long, succulent finish. Here is a classic instance of virtually 100% new wood at this estate scarcely sapping textural allure or primary juiciness, a phenomenon that de Castelnau is more inclined to attribute to the quality of grape tannins and sheer extract of vinous raw material that results from long but gentle, watchful fermentative extraction (usually followed by malo) as opposed to crediting the provenance or treatment of the estate’s barrels (though surely these represent a glove-fit). “The wine has to be completely constructed before going to barrel” is how he puts it, echoing Jean-Marie Guffens’ well-known and far more than just clever adage that “a wine can take as much new wood as it doesn’t need.” Plan to follow this one through at least 2019. (The 2010 rendition of Carquelin, when tasted alongside, performed at the upper end of my Issue 196 projection, adding some mossy, forest floor mystery to the bright red berries and saline, meaty savor I detailed there.)
While wine guru Jacques Lardiere has retired after more than four decades as Jadot’s technical director, his choice as hands-on director of Chateau des Jacques when Jadot purchased it in 2000, Guillaume de Castelnau, remains in charge there. (You can read more about their aspirations and methods for Beaujolais in my Issue 184, 190, and 196 reports.) That the team here considers the 2011 harvest – which began on August 27 but had already concluded on September 9 – a rousing success will come as no surprise just from scanning my scores. Only two wines in the eventual collection even came near to reaching 13.5% alcohol, yet all are richly fruited and generously mouth-filling, and most of them already texturally alluring as well, even given 20-30 days of fermentative extraction (via both punch-downs and pump-overs in a regimen adapted to each site). I’ll let the estate’s two bottlings that debuted this vintage – plus one inaugurated in 2010 – introduce themselves by way of the relevant tasting notes, but readers should note that the absence of reviews for 2011 vintage wines from Champs de Cour, Clos des Thorins, or (in Morgon) Roche Noire reflects a decision by the domaine to eliminate separate bottlings from those sites, whose fruit will instead entirely inform – and, no doubt, enrich – the relevant generic bottlings. (De Castelnau did hold open the option of an occasional special, perhaps market- or even client-dedicated bottling from one or more of these sites.) With the exception of one Morgon cuvee still in cask when I tasted it last December, all of the 2011 reds from Chateau des Jacques were bottled in late July and early August of last year. In keeping with a convention noted in the introduction to this report, I have also published here new notes on single-site Chateau des Jacques 2010s to the extent (often considerable, and then always positively!) that they performed outside the bounds of the (two-point spread) projections that accompanied my tasting notes on them from barrel or tank in Issue 196. I have appended to my note on the corresponding 2011, or most nearly related 2010, brief parenthetic comments on the recent bottle performances of any 2010 if its rating fell within my Issue 196 projection.
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