Two Recent Chablis

I had an opportunity over the summer to taste two bottles of the 2002 Brocard Chablis les Clos, a wine I drank some years ago at our Chablis Fest. In between the bottles this summer and that tasting, I tasted one or two bottles that had struck me as pleasant, but otherwise not particularly compelling. What a little bottle age will do! This wine is now starting to drink very well, but perhaps even more interesting is the way in which it has developed (probably recognizable to the Chablis experts out there). The 2002 Brocard les Clos shows the characteristic almost oily richness of the vintage that others have noted, but the wine started out as a round, juicy, well built Chablis dominated by rich citrus notes that have now given way to a kind of two-toned character--an even sweeter, almost viscous initial attack on the mid-palate that is followed by long, slightly bitter quinine notes on the finish. It is almost as if the initially largely monolithic (if flavorful) wine has bifurcated, morphing to a much more complex and interesting two-headed beast in which the sweet and acidic elements appear at different times.

Another recent wine is the 2006 Fevre Montmains, which I have seen some refer to as beginning to show tropical fruit notes. I myself picked up no such tropical fruit notes, but noted instead a distinct development of more pronounced (white) floral aromas infused by finely comminuted chalk dust. In short, on an excellent aging trajectory from what I tasted a few years ago now, although maturity is still a couple of years out.