The Ugly Duckling Year

Bring up 2004 among Burgundy drinkers and the conversation gets a little quieter. The vintage was roughed up by critics on release, and then came the long argument about the ladybug taint — that green, faintly bitter note traced to coccinelles caught up in the harvest. For years the sensible thing to do with 2004 reds was to not talk about them.

Time has been kinder than the critics were. Past the twenty-year mark, the survivors tell a different story: the green edge has largely receded, and the acidity that made the wines seem shrill in youth now reads as spine. What is left, in the good bottles, is unusually transparent terroir — a vintage that stopped shouting over its vineyards because it never had much muscle to shout with.

Chapelle-Chambertin is a fitting place to test that idea. At about five and a half hectares it is one of the smallest of Gevrey-Chambertin’s grands crus, sitting just below Clos de Bèze on the eastern side of the road. The name remembers a small chapel the monks of Bèze built there in 1155; the chapel is long gone, and only the vineyard kept the word. Among the Gevrey grands crus it has always been the light-footed one — pale in color, more lace than muscle.

Bouchard Père & Fils, founded in 1731 and headquartered at the Château de Beaune, is one of Burgundy’s oldest houses and one of its largest vineyard owners. Its sheer size keeps it slightly underrated, which has a pleasant consequence: mature bottles from serious vineyards can still be opened without ceremony.

At twenty-two years the wine was exactly what the revisionists promise. Pale garnet, a nose of red fruit, dead leaves and damp earth, tannin worn down to a fine grain, and that cool acidity holding the whole thing upright — no longer sharp, just alert. Nothing about it raised its voice, which is Chapelle’s nature as much as the vintage’s.

It is drinking now, and I would not push my luck much further; 2004 is a vintage with a delicate constitution, better poured straight from the bottle and given time in the glass than decanted. The ugly duckling needed twenty-two years. It got there.