2015 Hermitage

As good as Hermitage can get, the 2015 Hermitage from Jean-Louis Chave reminds me of a hypothetical mix of the 2010 and 1990 with its incredible purity, finesse, and elegant paired with awesome depth and structure. This heavenly wine exhibits a deep purple color as well as a powerful bouquet of crème de cassis, blackberries, dried violets, graphite, and crushed rocks, with a liquid mineral component that’s just about impossible to find outside of the Bessards lieu-dit in Hermitage. Full-bodied and massively concentrated on the palate, yet with laser-like precision and clarity, it needs a solid decade of cellaring and will keep for 40+ years or more. It’s not as sexy or overt as the Cuvee Cathelin, but is every bit as good. Taking over the from his father, Gerard Chave, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the brilliant Jean-Louis Chave continues to keep his family estate at the top of the heap in regard to true reference point estates in the world today. Drinking a mature Hermitage from the Chave family is one of the greatest wine experiences a wine lover can have. These are majestic, singular wines. And while it would have been easy to rest on his laurels and reputation, Jean-Louis has done nothing of the sort and has worked tirelessly at the estate, overseeing the creation of a new cellar that was completed in 2014 as well as resurrecting numerous new vineyard sites in Saint Joseph, which are just now coming largely online. In addition, he and his wife, Erin Cannon-Chave, have created a négociant label called Chave Selection that offers fabulous bang-for-the-buck and includes both Northern and Southern Rhônes. Looking specifically at their Hermitage releases, the grapes are always destemmed, with the individual terroirs vinified separately in stainless steel and aged in small barrels, most being used. The percentage of new oak has decreased over the past few decades and today hovers around 20-30% new French oak. Blending occurs a few months before bottling, and the wines are unfiltered.Looking at the vintages reviewed here, the 2015s are from a magical vintage in the Northern Rhône, and both Hermitage releases are as profound as wine gets. The Cuvée Cathelin is a deeper, richer, more exotic wine, but good luck finding bottles in the market. I include that wine in the handful of greatest young wines I’ve ever been lucky enough to taste. The classic Hermitage is more classic and elegant, with a rare sense of minerality, structure, and concentration. These are both Desert Island wines. The 2016 Hermitage shows the more elegant style of the vintage, but certainly isn’t far from the 2015. In addition, this estate continues to be a bastion for true Hermitage Blanc, and the 2016 Hermitage Blanc delivers the richness and depth as well as minerality that can only be achieved from this magical hillside. Thankfully, this estate has ignored the ridiculous trend over the past decade toward producing so-called “fresher” and more “elegant” wines. The 2017s showed beautifully from barrel and have the sunny, upfront nature of the vintage. They don’t have the sheer density of the 2015s, but they have more sex appeal than the 2016s. In short, you can’t go wrong with any of these wines, and life is too short not to drink as much Chave as you can!

The 2015 Hermitage is in bottle and it's a profound, long-lived wine, although the 2017 may perhaps surpass it in terms of pure pleasure. The 2015 is a bit meaty and cedary up front, backed by a mix of berry fruit and spice variations. But what stands out is the wine's immaculate structure and balance. It's firm and tannic without being hard or unyielding, finishing with fold after fold of velvety richness. While the impatient can certainly derive some pleasure from it even now, I'd opt for cellaring it a decade or more. Oct 2018, www.robertparker.com