Tasted in Chablis with Sandrine Audegond and Grégory Viennois, 15th January 2015.
Domaine Laroche
L’Obédiencerie
22 rue Louis Bro
89800 Chablis
Tel: +33 3 86 42 89 00
www.larochewines.com
Gregory on 2013:
“Triage was important but we ended up with about 35 hl/ha: 90 hectares to harvest very quickly was no small challenge.
“We made a more severe debourbage (decanting the pressed juice from its lees) but also relatively long elevage.
“Basically this is a vintage that won’t support (tolerate) higher volumes – the result would be mediocrity.”
The wines…
Just a really good range, particularly so in the context of the vintage…
2014 Domaine, Petit Chablis
The first early bottling so… Done last week.
Fresh, and actually quite pretty fruit – actually quite a forward, fresh pear note. Round, easy drinking but it’s a lovely fresh but ripe mix. Again quite fruit forward and easy. Pretty wine!
2013 Domaine, Chablis St.Martin
Started bottling in July 2014. A small yield this vintage.
A little tight but with a fine and delicate width. Round, with growing intensity, and serious density in the mid-palate. This wine remains a little understated, but has everything it needs. Super!
2013 Domaine, Chablis 1er Les Vaudevey
Bottled yesterday!
Wide, with faint SO2. Lovely silky texture and weight of minerality with slowly mouth-watering acidity. No austerity here – a really super, slightly contemplative wine.
2013 Domaine, Chablis 1er Côte de Lechet
Bottled almost a month.
Open, pretty with a weight of fruit that hints to pear. Lovely cool fruit in the mouth, and understated but very supporting acidity. An extra growth of quite direct flavour in the finish. Really quite some persistence here. Holds for minutes if you want to check
2013 Chablis 1er Beauroy Selection (i.e. négoce)
Will be bottled next month.
A wide and deep nose with more high tones. Lithe, virtually no fat. There‘s a little mid-palate perfume and a fine if decaying length. Yum
2013 Domaine Chablis 1er Beauroy
Bottled last week.
More weight of aroma, starting with a very faint reductive note. More direct, more mineral more cool and fresh – again with a hint of reduction and some perfume, but the flavour holds with more intensity.
2013 Chablis 1er Vaillons Selection
Not yet in bottle.
The nose starts tight but soon releases high tones and floral notes. Wide, just a little richer but with good mouth-watering acidity. Here is a core of flavour – half fruit, half mineral. Good length too.
2013 Domaine, Chablis 1er Vaillons
Fresh, more open, rounder and riper. Again, more direct, with more acidity and a narrower line of flavour that‘s fine and mouth-watering. Very different again…
2013 Chablis 1er Montmains Selection
Here is a modest but very pretty array of citrus and agrume fruit aroma. A fine, really mineral flavour. It’s rather direct but widens a little in the mid-palate. Slowly lingering with a faint perfume too.
Tighter at the top but with a little more depth of aroma and faint perfume slowly developing in the glass. Fresh, mouth-watering, some sweetness, not a wine of richness despite a slight plushness to the texture. Gorgeous! Beautiful finishing flavour.
2013 Chablis 1er Vaucopins Selection
An open and very pretty nose of perfumed fruit. Here is a very fresh, beautiful wine that can only be from Chablis. Faint reduction but with super flavour – really a bit of a peacock’s tail of flavour. Very yum indeed!
2013 Domaine, Chablis 1er Les Fourneaux
A growing weight of aroma – only very slowly releasing a few higher tones. A little gas; it‘s harder to judge this one – certainly intense and with a good acidity. Mouth-watering in the finish though.
A slowly building weight of aroma in the glass – some herb but lots of complexity too. Lovely fresh, cool fruit with intensity. Here is an almost chiselled wine with a really beautiful growth of intense flavour in the mid-palate. Really super.
Modest to start with but here is a growing weight of aroma – to start with it’s mainly a warm ripeness that hints to oak. Super mineral, the flavour just bursts from every corner of your mouth after you swallow. An absolute beauty. Bravo!
2013 Domaine, Chablis Les Bougros
Harvested the same day as Côte de Lechets.
A modest but complete aromatic with both high tones and bass notes. Grounded in deep minerality, this is concentrated, indeed guarded in its flavours. Weight of extract here, but wait for another day…
2013 Domaine, Chablis Les Blanchots
Here is just a faint extra addition of oak aroma. Bigger and rounder, but still with a good base of minerality. Really a bigger dimension of flavour in the finish – still plenty of barrique on display but this is excellent wine.
A deep aroma that‘s clearly multi-dimensional yet at the same time, showing a certain reserve. Big in the mouth – I might say massive, but really despite a little richness, this is about complexity and very good energy. Flavour grows a little more in the finish. Lithe and dynamic even, excellent certainly.
Much less than the usual 3,000 bottles – just 1,200 bottled at the start of December.
A modest nose with some faint higher tones – also a weight of aroma underneath that also shows a little oak. Round, super-silky, zen-like wine before a mid-palate that starts to show a little oak flavour, but really only as part of a big, overall complexity. The finish is not just about the bass notes, there‘s also a little higher-toned stuff going on. This will be great, but you will have to be patient – and looking at the volume, maybe lucky too…
A big aromatic with a depth of riper notes and quite a lot of freshness above. Wow. – intense! A wow wine. Hardly any more to say!
2012 Domaine, Chablis 1er Montmains
A much more discreet nose that‘s airy, fresh and clean. Again, there’s brilliant intensity but freshness and weight without richness.
2011 Domaine, Chablis Blanchots
A little ripeness and plenty of weight, but no asparagus – this smells very nice. Lovely texture with both feet absolutely in Chablis, just a faint Blanchots richness. Super finish.
2011 Domaine, Chablis Les Clos
Fresh and with an impressive depth of mineral impression. Wide, very big in the mouth but a wine with a little weight and a lot of complexity – really super length. Not so dynamic as the 13 but with real persistence in the finish.