2006 Domaine William Fèvre Chablis Vaudesir Grand Cru

The Fevre 2006 Chablis Vaudesir projects lemon and herbs along with a strikingly saline, chicken stock-like character such as only Chablis from among the world’s wines can display. Despite its impressive amplitude and high but flattering fat content, this isn’t expressing overtly ripe or tropical fruits, but instead hammers home the messages of meat and minerals, along with an equally unexpected severity of bright citrus in the finish. Is this impressively concentrated and intriguingly mysterious wine just in an awkward stage, I wonder? Didier Seguier has presided over a remarkable surge in quality at this address during the past decade in which Henriot has owned Fevre. The wines are now every bit as impressive as the estate’s vast and superbly-situated acreage, not to mention uncannily consistent in quality. Somehow, Fevre has acquired a reputation in some quarters simply for their widespread use of oak. In fact – just as at the region’s other top addresses, Dauvissat and Raveneau – the wood here is nearly always discreet, and Seguier is keen to finish the elevage on most of his wines in tank once he deems them to have spent long enough in barrel. Hand-harvesting and two sorting tables help insure quality of fruit, and Seguier’s insistence that botrytis was unproblematic for him in either 2006 or 2005 is ably supported by the gustatory evidence. Fermentation was relatively rapid, he relates, and the malo-lactic transformation not especially profound, due to the dominance of ripe, tartaric acid in the fruit. With one exception, the grand cru wines (all of which are vinified ca. 80% in barrel) had just been prepped for bottling (including cross-flow filtration) when I tasted them, but that did not prevent them from showing brilliantly. Importer: Henriot, Inc, New York, NY; tel. (212) 605-6706