2018 Dauvissat

[William_Kelley]

By “malolactic instability”, you mean the products of the malolactic fermentation somehow break down (perhaps even in the absence of high O2)? I have wondered off and on if something like this was the problem with Fevre, where I had the impression the “creamier” (for want of a better word, presumably the malo products) seem to go south over some relatively short period of time.

The Petit Chablis is not Kimmeridgian soil, if I recall. Is this really the same stuff as the Chablis and up?

Otherwise, the most backwards of the Dauvissat seems to be the Clos, which underperforms the Preuses typically in the early ratings, then surges past when you get to 10-12 years. Still a step up from the Forest in most years…

No, I mean that malolactic fermentation is incomplete, and then starts up again in bottle at a later date (i.e. if they wine warms up a little in transit, for example). I have seen lab analyses of Dauvissat wines that still contained appreciable quantities of malic acid - 1996, for example - and could imagine this is not uncommon. Malolactic instability was one reason many domaines began sterile filtering white Burgundies in the 1980s, solving the problem by removing the microbes rather than removing the malic acid.

As far as the geological imprint on the wines is concerned (and note, to be pedantic, that it’s the bedrock that’s Kimmeridgian), all I can say is that I once watched a Master of Wine, who has written a book on Chablis, guess Dauvissat’s 1996 Petit Chablis as 1996 Les Clos when tasting blind in the cellars with Vincent. I guessed the vintage and left the appellation to him, and I was glad I did, as I might easily have embarrassed myself just as much. In practice, when you walk around the vineyards of Chablis, and especially the grand cru slope, you find lots of fragments of both types of bedrock mixed into the soils, and in Les Clos it is quite difficult to find—at least on the surface—the “oyster shell” Kimmeridgian limestone of which so much is made, so I think these distinctions are overdrawn. If you find someone with really good viticulture, who harvests by hand, and who makes wine in a classical, artisanal way (and you do not need all your fingers and toes to count them), you can be assured of a good bottle of Chablis irrespective of the appellation. And I would certainly not disdain any bottle of Dauvissat on the grounds that the vines that produced it touched the wrong kind of limestone with their roots.

As for Les Clos surging past Les Preuses, I’m not so sure about that either. They are just very different wines, and preferences are more a matter of taste than of quality. Vincent, I think, prefers Les Preuses over Les Clos, and I tend to follow him on that. The three best bottles of Dauvissat I had last year were probably 1989 Preuses, 1976 Séchet and 2008 Les Clos, in that order.