2018 Dauvissat

Had a 2018 La Forest and Preuses last night off a restaurant list. Pretty fresh off the boat I guess.

I often find Dauvissat to have a short but good drinking window right after bottling. Was the case last night but needed almost 2 hours to open up. Found the Preueses to be the outperformed this time, normally I find the Forest drinks better off the boat. Preuses was much more open and had the grand cru level intensity / deep iodine which put it a step above. This was my first 2018 Chablis but left dinner impressed with the vintage.

No 2017’s on the list! Galloni rated the 17 Les Preuses 100pts. Greatest Dauvissat ever in his opinion.

Super wines no matter what…IMO.

Were you drinking them outside of the US?
Preuses is a grand cru and should be better than the Forest

I think the implication is the Forest could be showing better in youth here. Also depending on who you ask La Forest is GC quality in the right hands.

Exactly. Preuses is a better wine but most years I dont think the GCs open up in the same way as the 1ers right after bottling. For sure with 2017, La Forest showed better right out of the gate even against the “greatest ever”. Not disputing relative quality just early drinking window

I have the 2018 Dauvissat Chablis in my glass right now, from the Vineyard Brands bottling. It’s a very pretty wine, and fresher than the 2015 was at the same age, as well as a touch more open-knit. I’d venture that there are some points of comparison with 2009. It isn’t on the level of the 2017, however, nor the 2014, 2012 and 2010 or 2008. Of those years, incidentally, I’d nominate '14 as the best, rather than 2017, beautiful though the later vintage is. The 2017s are just a touch more sun-kissed which lends them more immediate appeal out of the gates, but I think 2014 will always have the edge.

+1 for 2014. Had the 2014 La Forest week before last and it blew the socks off a 2013 Raveneau Butteax. I haven’t been crazy about the 2013s so no surprise there

Another vote for 14. I also think that 12 is better than 17.
17 remains excellent and much more approachable than 12 and 14 were at the same age…

After some nicely premoxed Dauvissat”s, I believe in 2008 vintage, and hearing that they are in some degree of denial, and with the Grand Crus now in our marketplace at over $200 per bottle, I am no longer a buyer. Of course, if you drink them early, no problem…but then, are they worth the premium? Oh, whatever.

It’s a difficult one, and of course it’s a conundrum that applies at many estates. I did observe that the 2018s have been bottled with really nice, dense, unbleached corks from Trescases, which should stack the decks somewhat more in their favor. But premox at Dauvissat is an interesting one, in that I never had an oxidized bottle in France, where I drink a lot of the wines—including many recent bottles of 2008, all pristine. By contrast, in the UK and US I have had quite a few oxidized bottles from that vintage. Even if wines tend to show better “sur place” in general, that seems to be especially acute in Dauvissat’s case. This has sometimes made me wonder if the issue is malolactic instability (exacerbated by transport) rather than classic premox. But it’s hard to say. Certainly, in terms of winemaking practices, they do everything right, so if there is a weak link there, it would have to be at the bottling line or an issue with closures.

In so far as there’s a solution for you, it might be to buy more Petit Chablis and Chablis, and pass on the higher appellations which really do need time. Frankly, I would prefer to drink Dauvissat’s Petit Chablis than the majority of producers’ grand cru bottlings in any case.

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By “malolactic instability”, you mean the products of the malolactic fermentation somehow break down (perhaps even in the absence of high O2)? I have wondered off and on if something like this was the problem with Fevre, where I had the impression the “creamier” (for want of a better word, presumably the malo products) seem to go south over some relatively short period of time.

The Petit Chablis is not Kimmeridgian soil, if I recall. Is this really the same stuff as the Chablis and up?

Otherwise, the most backwards of the Dauvissat seems to be the Clos, which underperforms the Preuses typically in the early ratings, then surges past when you get to 10-12 years. Still a step up from the Forest in most years…

No, I mean that malolactic fermentation is incomplete, and then starts up again in bottle at a later date (i.e. if they wine warms up a little in transit, for example). I have seen lab analyses of Dauvissat wines that still contained appreciable quantities of malic acid - 1996, for example - and could imagine this is not uncommon. Malolactic instability was one reason many domaines began sterile filtering white Burgundies in the 1980s, solving the problem by removing the microbes rather than removing the malic acid.

As far as the geological imprint on the wines is concerned (and note, to be pedantic, that it’s the bedrock that’s Kimmeridgian), all I can say is that I once watched a Master of Wine, who has written a book on Chablis, guess Dauvissat’s 1996 Petit Chablis as 1996 Les Clos when tasting blind in the cellars with Vincent. I guessed the vintage and left the appellation to him, and I was glad I did, as I might easily have embarrassed myself just as much. In practice, when you walk around the vineyards of Chablis, and especially the grand cru slope, you find lots of fragments of both types of bedrock mixed into the soils, and in Les Clos it is quite difficult to find—at least on the surface—the “oyster shell” Kimmeridgian limestone of which so much is made, so I think these distinctions are overdrawn. If you find someone with really good viticulture, who harvests by hand, and who makes wine in a classical, artisanal way (and you do not need all your fingers and toes to count them), you can be assured of a good bottle of Chablis irrespective of the appellation. And I would certainly not disdain any bottle of Dauvissat on the grounds that the vines that produced it touched the wrong kind of limestone with their roots.

As for Les Clos surging past Les Preuses, I’m not so sure about that either. They are just very different wines, and preferences are more a matter of taste than of quality. Vincent, I think, prefers Les Preuses over Les Clos, and I tend to follow him on that. The three best bottles of Dauvissat I had last year were probably 1989 Preuses, 1976 Séchet and 2008 Les Clos, in that order.

William’s comments are as usual educational and thought-provoking. I find the same issue w Raveneau—prefer Valmur over Clos like preferring Preuses over Clos chez Dauvissat. Fun to have both!

Regarding premox and Dauvissat I need to echo what William just stated: Over the last 8-10 years (only then discovered Dauvissat) I have been drinking dozens of bottles at home (Denmark) and in restaurants in Europe going back to vintage 2001 but most 2006 and younger. I’ve yet to open a premox’ed bottle.

Opened my first bottle 2016 (Forest) last night - just wonderful. Will leave these and 2017/2018/2014 to sleep while I drink my pre-2014 vintages.

Well, I will be glad to participate in a blind tasting with Petit Chablis and Chablis. I was not necessarily attributed everything to those oyster shells, but there is some combination of these marine limestones and clays (especially in the Grand Cru, as far as I can see). I have had a few (but no more) Petit Chablis and they struck me as significantly different from Chablis, but a blind tasting would be the only more or less objective way to test. Using a top winemaker like Dauvissat would be a great way to do this (perhaps I mixed in lesser winemakers into my casual assessment).

All of my top wines that were older were again Dauvissat Clos, but I have only had a couple of the Preuses. Certainly this one seems richer, less austere, with the Clos pretty much requiring 10 years. Best Dauvissat was the 1996 Dauvissat Clos (significantly underrated recently by Tanzer IMO), followed by the 2007 Clos…

Interesting about the incomplete malo idea…

Interesting comments, William…appreciate your discussions on these boards quite a lot. Having stopped buying WB some years ago due to horrible experience with premix, and now considering slowly dipping a toe back in, I am assessing what risks I am ready to take. Drinking early is one strategy, but for my money only worth it for lower priced wines…Petit Chablis, as you mention. Drinking only under DIAM is one ai am considering. Trying a few producers not (yet) under DIAM who may have worked on a number of factors (increasing SO2, ? Still using basket presses, etc.) is another. Can’t get Coche and Raveneau, so that is not a solution!

But with all of that,I live on the West Coast of the US, and it seems like the issues of shipment and storage exposing underlying vulnerabilities is yet another bag of worms…worse outside of France, perhaps, worse in the US than Europe, worse on the West Coast than the East, and of course worse depending on warehouse and retail storage after it gets here.
Perhaps these latter issues were always in play, but it still gets back to what changed in 95-96 that made the underlying wines, in so many cases, more vulnerable. And perhaps it is too many things that changed to put a finger on.

Most Petit Chablis is overcropped, machine harvested, enzymatically clarified, fermented with selected yeasts in large stainless tanks with strict temperature control below 20 degrees centigrade, then fined, sterile filtered, and bottled early. Actually, that is true of most Chablis in general—which it why it’s remarkable that most Chablis still tastes recognizably like Chablis, and different from other Chardonnay handled so abusively elsewhere. But Petit Chablis is likely to be treated the worst - and overcropped the most flagrantly - of any wine in a given range. Unfortunately, there are also often multiple bottlings of such cuvées, and the overseas markets, for logistical reasons, generally get the first: meaning less time on the lees and generally a somewhat inferior product. So the question is to what extent is the terroir hierarchy being revealed and to what extent is it being reinforced?

Dauvissat makes the reference, and it is very good. Raveneau’s young vine cuvée is very good, too. But beyond that, if I were to buy Petit Chablis elsewhere I would consider Moreau Naudet, Patrick Piuze, Samuel Billaud (all from the plateau above the grand cru) and Séguinot Bordet (from Maligny, meaning more clay and thus more texture).

Try to find a bottle of Dauvissat’s 1997 Les Clos! We had a magnum last Spring and it was terrific. An underrated vintage for Chablis.

My pleasure.

One producer I have found very reliable, including in the late-90s / early-2000s “death zone”, is Bernard Moreau. This domaine is the largest holding of white Burgundy in my personal cellar, so if I am wrong, I will be the first to be badly burnt.

So William, what would a wine that suffers from malolactic instability, and perhaps a restart of malolactic fermentation, taste like? I too am on the west coast of the US, and have had quite a bit of Dauvissat premox in the 2008-2011 range (and interestingly, not a lot before). These wines seem to me to have pretty classic premox characteristics (baked, browned apple, darker color, all of which gets worse with air, are the most common characteristics).

I realized I had never tried a Petit Chablis from a good producer, so I went ahead and grabbed a bottle of the 2016 Dauvissat Petit Chablis. Now I just need to source the Grand Cru (or Premier Cru) to put it up against…