CHABLIS 1er Cru FOURCHAUME 1990 from CAVES DUPLESSIS – Gérard Duplessis
When a bottle of mature Chablis is good, it is very very good.
I bought half a dozen bottles of this in about 1998 from the estate, who then kept quite a stock of older vintages. The first two bottles consumed shortly afterwards were excellent but two others opened more recently were disappointing, one of which was clearly dying out and breaking up and the other was beginning to oxidise. So I was quite prepared to discard last night’s bottle after the first sniff and sip. I need not have worried; the wine was super.
The nose was quite subdued but complex with floral and creamy notes. However the wine opened up on the palate in a way that its nose did not presage. Aromas were of white fruit, nuts and minerals on a medium weight quite fleshy body filling out towards the finish with a delightful honeyed and mineral fragrance. Any typically Chablis flintiness and steeliness has long since been absorbed, if indeed they were ever very present in this warm year but there was plenty of delicious acidity to provide freshness. A lovely wine (or should I say bottle?).
When mature Chablis (and other white burgundy) shows like this, it is a wine experience not to be missed. Young Chablis is often delicious too but ageing can bring about an enormous increase in complexity and depth without eliminating freshness. Sadly this lot was plagued by bottle variation, although none suffered overtly from TCA. So far only three out of five bottles have been good. When the increasing risks of premature oxidisation from vintages since 1995 is added to this already poor batting average, it require great faith and a deep pocket to buy these wines and let them age so as to achieve such a celestial transformation in a hopefully reasonable proportion of the bottles.
(The Gérard Duplessis estate still exists but has been dropped from RVF’s Le Classement, partly, I guess, because they persist in harvesting mechanically, which offends the purists. I do not know whether he still stocks older vintages?)