MCF Rare Wine Ltd.
 
The Other Dauvissat

Mineral.

Refined.

Bracing.

Whatever more specific descriptors may also be attributed to them, all great Chablis will have these three elements in spades.

There's a reason that Chablis is one of the Chardonnay grape's most revered iterations.

There's nothing quite like it and proper examples can be anything from delicious all the way to transcendent.

And, as today's wine makes quite clear, they age beautifully as well.

Even though it's already inching toward its tenth birthday, Jean Dauvissat's 2008 1er Cru Vaillons VV shows good evidence for the development of a lot more complexity in the coming years.

That's provided you don't find it way too tasty already.    

Jean Dauvissat produces a 'Chablis drinker's Chablis', and by that I mean that the wines aren't flashy or stylish, they're just classic, bright, energetic and firmly structured.

While his wines may not garner the accolades of the more-famous Dauvissat in the region, at this price level and quality, they should definitely be on your radar.

2008 was a classic year for the region, with its signature elegance and finely detailed structure accentuating very best elements of what great Chablis is all about.

This is a wine of great energy thanks to its brightness and bracing acidity but it's also a wine of sublime elegance and precision.  You may hear people talk about a wine having great tension -- the push and pull of contrasting textures on the palate -- and this is a perfect example of it.

While it's already showing a lot of secondary complexity, the racy acidity is still fairly tightly wound, which endows it with plenty of structure for a good 5+ years in the cellar.

Whenever things like this come along, (a textbook version of a classic wine that already has some good age on it that I'm able to offer at a price that puts it squarely into the value column) it's always a very rewarding to get then into peoples' hands!

Matt Franco

MCF Rare Wine, Ltd
237 West 13th Street
New York 10011
mcf@mcf-rarewine.com
212.255.8870
www.mcf-rarewine.com