[wine] Chablis Leaps Forward into the Past

(The New York Times, 3-30-12; copyright 2012 The New York Times) By Eric Pfanner COURGIS, FRANCE — This hamlet in the hills of northern Burgundy hardly looks like the wellspring of a winemaking revival. On a damp Monday morning in March, only the distant rattle of a tractor breaks the silence. A suspicious pair of eyes monitors a visiting car’s progress down the Grande Rue Nicolas Droin; in these parts, even the dogs can pick out Paris license plates. But Courgis (population 260) is home to two of the most forward-thinking producers of Chablis, whose vineyards surround Courgis and several neighboring villages. Thomas Pico, of Domaine Pattes Loup, and Alice and Olivier de Moor, of their eponymous winery, are making Chablis of startling quality, using natural, ecologically friendly methods that many of their peers long ago abandoned. Innovation is not always good for wine, especially when vineyard work is replaced with laboratory science. This is what happened during an earlier leap forward in Chablis, in the second half of the previous century. vineyard area expanded tenfold by the end of the century. Growth was fueled by demand in export markets, where the name of Chablis, like that of its near neighbor Champagne, became a catch-all term — in this case for dry white wine of any origin. Trade agreements and legal action have mostly ended these practices, though it is still possible to stumble across absurdities like “California Blush Chablis.” Talk about fake wine. Yet some of the damage to the image and the terroir of Chablis was self-inflicted. In order to meet international demand, the growers embraced the use of herbicides, pesticides and grape-picking machines with a fervor rarely seen in other French wine regions. Production soared but quality often suffered. “In my grandparents’ time everyone harvested by hand,” Mr. Pico said. “Now everyone finishes at five and is in front of the television by eight. A way of life has disappeared.” Not entirely. Chablis is home to another pair of producers, Jean-Marie Raveneau and Vincent Dauvissat, who have long been critics’ favorites. Their wines are old-school icons, but unless you have considerable patience you might struggle to understand what the fuss is about — or even to find them. More consistently appealing, I think, are the wines of another long-established Chablis estate, William Fèvre. This is perhaps the greatest landowner in Chablis, with vines in all seven of the appellation’s grand-cru vineyards. Tasting Fèvre’s Les Clos from a good year is a memorable experience. Chablis can do the classics. What it seemed to lack until recently, however, was a certain type of hip new producer, like those who have reinvigorated other French wine regions, among them the Loire Valley, the Rhône Valley and the heartland of Burgundy — the Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune, about an hour’s drive south of Chablis. In these areas, upstarts or outsiders have been making wine that sometimes challenges the powers that be and prompts everyone to question long-held assumptions. Enter Mr. Pico and the de Moors. Along with a few other up-and-coming producers based elsewhere in the region, including Patrick Piuze, a French-Canadian, and several outfits with local roots, including Domaines Oudin, Domaine Servin and Gilbert Picq, they have brought a fresh spirit to Chablis. Mr. Pico is not exactly an outsider; his father, too, is a vigneron. After studying oenology and working with producers in the Côte de Beaune, he decided to set up a separate winemaking operation, using some of the vineyards from the family estate. His first vintage was 2006. Mr. Pico switched to organic cultivation, then went a step further with the application of biodynamic principles, under which growers try to create a healthy ecosystem for the vines — helping them to help themselves. He harvests by hand, which is still an anomaly in Chablis. “I could earn a lot more money if I did mechanical harvesting, if I used pesticides and herbicides,” Mr. Pico said. “I could even take a vacation. But I like my work.” While the benefits of biodynamics are sometimes disputed, those of another so-called natural winemaking method that Mr. Pico has adopted seem clear: a reduction in the use of sulfur dioxide, a headache-inducing preservative. While some sulfur dioxide is found in most wines, including many that are organic, Mr. Pico says he adds only a fraction of the amount in supermarket wines, which need heavy doses to remain shelf-stable for many months or years. That means his wines might be more fragile than your typical Chablis. They are definitely less standardized. When tasting a range of his wines, from several vintages, I noticed considerable variation, from the elegant, sharply focused 2010s to the almost plush 2009s to the slightly rough-hewn, almost tannic 2008s. Mr. Pico may be his own toughest critic, reproaching himself for one wine, his 2010 Côte de Jouan premier cru, that he called too “Beaunois” — that is, too much like the whites of the Côte de Beaune, which are generally bigger, richer and oakier than Chablis. Yet all the wines showed common elements, including a striking purity and a disarming openness. The northern location of Chablis means the growing season is long and cool, allowing a complex range of flavors to develop, while preserving freshness. An unusual feature of the soil, the presence of fossilized seashells from what was once a seabed, provides Chablis with its signature salinity. There is something about Chablis — perhaps it is the peaty complexity of the wine, perhaps the bleakness of the winter landscapes — that evokes the smell of country pubs in Ireland. In the hands of talented growers like Mr. Pico, Chablis lives up to its reputation as one of the noblest expressions of the chardonnay grape variety. All the clichés — “tightrope walker,” “razor’s edge,” “laserlike intensity” — that critics employ to describe its tense balance between racy acidity and earthy substance seem apt. Unfortunately, Chablis sometimes strikes a different balance, managing to be both indistinctly boring and shrilly acidic at the same time. “People say acidity is the key to Chablis,” Mr. de Moor said. “I agree, but it has to be the right acidity, a ripe acidity.” His wines, while more introverted than those of Mr. Pico, also have the right acidity, a melts-in-your-mouth kind that makes the wines hugely appealing and drinkable. Ripe fruit and low vineyard yields are part of the reason, Mr. de Moor said. Like Mr. Pico, he eschews “industrial” methods, espousing the virtues of biodynamics. In some ways, his success is more surprising than that of Mr. Pico. While Mr. de Moor is from the region, there is no history of winemaking in the family. There are no premiers crus or grands crus in the De Moor vineyard holdings — only ordinary Chablis, along with other, humbler nearby appellations. Mr. de Moor is an artist who illustrates the labels on his bottles, and his approach to winemaking is iconoclastic. At the moment, he is in a dispute with the appellation authorities over the varietal composition of Chablis, currently fixed at 100 percent chardonnay. Mr. de Moor wants to experiment with the addition of other varieties, like pinot gris. With global warming, chardonnay has sometimes ripened too early — in vintages like 2011 or 2007, for example — to develop the signature Chablis complexity, he said. “I’m not saying it’s the right solution, necessarily, but it’s worth trying,” he said. Mr. de Moor, who has been making wine for a few years longer than Mr. Pico, says he doesn’t want to be seen as a rebel. “In the beginning, we were going against the stream, against everything that had been done here,” he said. “But now we have been accepted. What we are doing is not sectarianism. It’s what consumers want, so that they can buy wine with greater security and conviction.”