The news from Chablis – Sébastien Dampt
Direct from the domaine to us, and from us to your cellar…
Our first stop after arriving at Paris Charles de Gaulle on the redeye was Chablis, which is a 2.5 hour drive (turned into 3.5 with rush hour traffic), for an extensive tasting with more than 150 producers represented. Yes, that’s right; we were about to taste a lot of wine after some ten hours in the air and on the highway – our job is not as easy as it sounds…
As we were walking to the tasting site we passed the cellars of Réne & Vincent Dauvissat and those of Domaine Raveneau – two of the most famous houses in Chablis. Our goal in this sort of a tasting is to find the rising star who may be one day mentioned among those revered names. Upon tasting through most of the producers – but certainly not all, to save our palates and be able to drive to Beaune afterwards – we came across Domaine Daniel Dampt, where Sébastien Dampt was pouring and we asked if we could taste his own namesake wines. His own domaine is a tiny estate that was founded in 2007, with only six hectares of vines, of which less than two are Chablis premier cru. We had already tasted through at least 150 wines before coming to his table, but turn out to have saved the best for last. Dampt’s wines were outstanding: laser-like focus, good energy, stony minerality and great depth of fruit from the 45+ year old vines. As we tasted with him we quickly recognised his intense passion reflected in the wines. He is a young fellow, maybe in his 30s, and definitely one who is experimenting with new techniques to improve the wines with every vintage. Sébastien told us that he is now keeping his Chablis in tank and bottle a little longer, in order to allow them to develop additional weight, greater clarity of structure and more complexity, while maintaining the classic minerality & balance of Chablis.
Sébastien’s Côte de Léchet 2017 comes from a small 0.7 hectare plot of 50 year-old vines and Les Vaillons 2017 from a 0.75 hectare parcel of 60 year-old vines. The Vaillons tends to be the more accessible of the two right out of the gate, while the Côte de Léchet would seem to benefit from a year or two in the bottle. These great wines just offer the very essence of Chablis. The ’17s have not yet been reviewed but previous vintages routinely receive 90+ scores from Allen Meadows’s publication Burghound.
A premier cru from Chablis is certainly among the best bargains you can find today – especially when you compare the price with that of a 1er crufrom ninety minutes southeast on the Côte d’Or…