A Third of the Hill

Chevalier-Montrachet covers 7.59 hectares in total. Bouchard Père & Fils holds 2.33 of them — close to a third, which makes it the largest owner on the slope. The vineyard falls into four terraces, and Bouchard is the only house with a parcel on every one of them. All of it was assembled in the nineteenth century, the kind of holding that simply cannot be put together any more.

The Domaine Bottling

The highest sliver, a little over 0.2 hectares, is bottled on its own as La Cabotte. This was not that wine. It was the domaine Chevalier, the blend of everything else — all four terraces in one bottle, which is in some ways the truer picture of what Bouchard owns on this hill. The house’s red side has appeared here before, in the Chapelle-Chambertin 2004; on the same evening this bottle followed the Krug 1990.

Chevalier sits directly above Le Montrachet, where the soil thins out and the stones come closer to the surface. If Montrachet is flesh, Chevalier is line and mineral tension. That makes 2009 an interesting test. It was a warm, generous year for white Burgundy — ripe, rounded, with gentle acidity — and the wines were called approachable almost from the start, while opinion split on how far they would go. The real question for a Chevalier from that vintage is whether the tension of the site outlasted the generosity of the season.

Seventeen Years On

Bright gold, and not deeper than it should be at this age. The nose gave ripe pear and stone fruit with acacia blossom, and underneath a saline, sea-breeze note, with oak present only as a light touch.

On the palate the wine came forward and was easy to meet. The flesh of ripe pear was held in check by an acidity closer to pear skin, and the minerality was clear and defined. The tension had survived.

This is a wine to drink now. Left longer it will move towards nuts and honey, and with white Burgundy of this age bottle variation is always part of the story, but there is no reason to wait for it.