A Debt Repaid in Chevalier

Some debts of gratitude are too large for words, and for those occasions there is the upper slope of Puligny-Montrachet. This bottle was opened for someone who deserved it — which is, in the end, the only correct use of a wine like this.

Domaine Leflaive is Puligny’s emblematic house, and the estate where Anne-Claude Leflaive made biodynamics respectable in Burgundy — converting the vineyards through the early 1990s, all twenty-four hectares by 1997, years before it was fashionable. Chevalier-Montrachet is the domaine’s largest grand cru holding, nearly two hectares in three parcels of forty-to-sixty-year-old vines; with the estate’s Montrachet itself a mere whisper of production, Chevalier is Leflaive’s true flagship. The vineyard sits directly above Montrachet on the hill, where the soil turns thin and stony — a slope that trades flesh for skeleton, giving mineral and spine where its downhill neighbour gives opulence.

The Premox Years

There is no honest way to open a 2004 white Burgundy without a held breath. This was the heart of the premature-oxidation era, when bottles from even the greatest addresses could be found dead a decade early. A Chevalier past twenty is either a casualty or a survivor, and you don’t know which until the cork is out.

In the Glass

Survivor. The colour ran deep gold, and the nose opened on the mature register — toasted bread, hazelnut, honey — but underneath sat pear, dried white flowers, honeycomb and a distinctly iodine, maritime minerality that had no intention of fading. The palate was full and layered, with acidity standing bright and vertebral through the middle; the core still compact, tightly structured, finishing long with a quiet herbal brush.

Age and freshness holding hands — the state every white Burgundy drinker hopes for and rarely gets from this era. The wine is in a beautiful window with no urgency about it.

The evening’s accounting: gratitude expressed, bottle vindicated, and one more 2004 crossed off the list of survivors. Some debts are a pleasure to pay.