The fall and rise of Hermitage La Chapelle

It’s troublesome to consider an iconic, historic wine that out of the blue misplaced its fame due to human tragedy, however Hermitage La Chapelle is that wine. Wine was being made across the city of Tain, south of Lyon, in Greek and Roman instances, earlier than a vine had been planted in Bordeaux. Within the nineteenth century, the highly effective wines of Hermitage have been so famend that Bordeaux producers would add some Hermitage to their wines to beef them up. Bordeaux wines that had been “Hermitagé” marketed the actual fact and attracted a premium.

Hermitage La Chapelle is known as after the chapel on the highest of the mound of granite on the left financial institution of the Rhône that’s the Hermitage appellation. It was the best wine made by Paul Jaboulet Aîné, which was for a very long time probably the most well-known wine firm within the northern Rhône.

The 1978, 1990 and 1991 vintages of Hermitage La Chapelle are legendary, and the 1961 was so celebrated that wine lovers would drive all around the nation to seek out it on wine lists. I’ve a reminiscence of ordering this still-magnificent pink within the Nineteen Eighties for simply £30 within the Dundas Arms in Kintbury, and savouring it to such an extent that I left my purse in my parents-in-law’s automobile, solely realising lengthy after they’d pushed again to Manchester. Right now, the few remaining bottles of it are provided at as much as €20,000.

Louis Jaboulet ran the corporate till he retired within the late Seventies. He had two sons, Gérard and Jacques. Jacques was accountable for winemaking, and Gérard, an inveterate traveller and wine connoisseur, was one of the cherished and finest knowledgeable figures within the wine world through the Nineteen Eighties and far of the Nineteen Nineties. If you happen to needed to know in regards to the newest wine developments in China or Mexico, apple-cheeked Gérard might let you know. And if he thought a wine was good, he would share it with you. He gave the impression to be all over the place. The annual London tasting of Jaboulet wines was a significant occasion within the Nineteen Eighties. An encounter with Gérard was keenly sought.

Gérard saved a agency hand on the various extensively admired wines his household produced. And so they produced them in appreciable amount, some primarily based on fruit purchased from different growers and never simply within the northern Rhône. The 1967 classic of their Châteauneuf Les Cèdres from the south, as an illustration, was one other iconic wine.

In 1992, Jacques suffered a critical diving accident and needed to take a step again from winemaking, after which the wines began to lose focus. In 1997, the sudden demise of Gérard from a coronary heart assault on the age of simply 55 signalled a whole meltdown of Hermitage La Chapelle. 

In his magisterial guide The Wines of the Northern Rhône (2005), Rhône specialist John Livingstone-Learmonth expressed his frustration on the decline in wine high quality and his incapability to get straight solutions as to how Jaboulet wines have been made. Explanations apparently various dramatically relying on which member of the family was giving them.

Within the Nineteen Nineties, the Jaboulets had expanded their winery holdings so significantly that, when Gérard died, the corporate was so invaluable and the tax burden so nice that Gérard’s widow Odile was obliged to work within the household enterprise. Gérard’s frequent travelling companions Jean-Jacques Vincent of Pouilly-Fuissé and Christian Pol-Roger of Champagne had apparently lengthy been urging him to kind out the corporate’s tax affairs to keep away from heavy demise duties, as they’d executed, however it was in useless.

I had the pleasure the opposite day of tasting 30 vintages of Hermitage La Chapelle from 1964 to 2015. For such a well-known wine, the variation in high quality and elegance was extraordinary. Vintages after 1991 had not one of the majesty of their predecessors, which had clearly been made to final. The 1967, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1985 and all 4 vintages from 1988 to 1991 have been nonetheless going sturdy. However the 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998 and 1999 have been nothing just like the vintages of outdated. The 2000, made the 12 months that Jacques additionally had a coronary heart assault, was infamous. It was made in huge amount and, it appears, with out the same old fastidious choice, maybe within the shadow of the tax invoice.

There have been household disputes, and speak of a sale was within the air. Of a number of events, the Swiss businessman Jean-Jacques Frey, who already owned Bordeaux cru classé Château La Lagune and a share of Champagne Billecart-Salmon, acquired the corporate in 2006, putting in his daughter Caroline to run it. Louis Jaboulet died on the age of 100 in 2012 and should have been as puzzled as everybody else by Caroline’s choice to import barrels from Bordeaux for her first classic when Burgundy barrels, with their completely different oak sources and thickness of staves, are conventional within the Rhône.

We tasted the 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2015 Frey-era vintages in our La Chapelle marathon. Not surprisingly, the 2007 was utterly completely different from the wine’s conventional character, a lot lighter and sweeter with not one of the savour of earlier vintages, though admittedly the climate in 2007 was much less propitious within the northern Rhône than within the different three rising seasons.

The 2009, nevertheless, confirmed a few of Hermitage’s characteristically meaty focus. The standard of the wine continued to enhance with the 2010 and particularly the succulent, savoury 2015, which ought to have a really lengthy life forward of it. These new wines from the Frey period are definitely extra defiantly trendy than these produced by the Jaboulets (who have been no nice followers of recent oak), however they do carry the signature of this very uncommon hillside. Presumably Caroline Frey’s willpower to transition to natural after which biodynamic viticulture has had an impact.

I feel traditionalists must be relieved to see that the wine may be very a lot again on an excellent keel and bears a recognisable relation to La Chapelles of outdated. However I do know many who have been dismayed by Caroline Frey’s choice, when she took over, to dispense with the normal packaging with its colored image of the chapel on the neck label and to utterly redesign the principle label. However she listened to complaints, and the outdated livery was reinstated in time for the discharge of the 2015 classic.

There are two main modifications, nevertheless. From the discharge of the 2021 classic on the finish of August this 12 months, Hermitage La Chapelle will now not carry the Jaboulet title however that of Domaine de La Chapelle. A separate entity is being established with its personal vineyard, designed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, anticipated to be prepared in time for the 2026 harvest. And Jaboulet’s white Hermitage, a wine that may be simply as majestic because the pink model, is now not referred to as Chevalier de Stérimberg however is now rebranded as Domaine de La Chapelle Blanc.  

The community of worldwide distributors constructed up by the late Gérard Jaboulet has been distributed with in favour of providing what was as soon as probably the most well-known wine within the Rhône valley, or the northern Rhône anyway, through the négociants of Bordeaux.

Gérard’s nice buddy was Gérard Chave, whose Hermitage is now typically cited as the best of the appellation. Domaine Jean-Louis Chave’s web site consists of a single web page and a single line of textual content: “Vignerons de père en fils depuis 1481” (“Vignerons from father to son since 1481”).

Tasting notes, scores and urged drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. Worldwide stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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