Wine Club
Chevalier, the white knight and the red
Possibly the finest white wine of all France, Chevalier Blanc is remarkable for having a little known cousin, a red Chevalier that stands up to many of the fine wines of the Médoc
If the white wine is widely acclaimed as one of the great dry white wines of the world, the red is often underrated. The high proportion of Cabernet, the marginal and youthful vineyards that require ruthless attention to ensure the grapes ripen fully, mean that red Chevalier is rarely a big, powerful wine. In its youth it is delicate and fine, sometimes austere, yet it somehow takes on weight and flesh as it ages. When I tasted, blind, a half-bottle of deeply coloured red at the château, I placed it in the 1970s. It was 1955. Any notion that red Chevalier is a light or insubstantial wine is without foundation.
The white remains astonishing. It has twice been my privilege to participate in vertical tastings of this wine: first in London in 1988, and more recently at the château, where 26 vintages were tasted blind by the technical staff and a few invited journalists. Just one elderly wine was unsatisfactory: the somewhat oxidised 1981. The other 25 were at the very least good, and most of them were exceptional, even from tricky vintages. Nor was there any rupture or stylistic change in the 1980s, when the château was changing hands. In their youth, the wines can be racy and citric, but it’s after 15 or 20 years that white Chevalier really comes into its own. The minerality remains, but the aromas evolve. There are stone-fruit aromas, a toastiness and smokiness that aren’t oak-derived, sometimes a nuttiness, a complete absence of hollowness on the palate, a harmonious balance between fruit and the ever-present acidity, and an extraordinary length of flavour. Although the degree of human intervention is considerable – think of those harvesters patrolling the same rows over and over again! – there is never any sense that these wines have been manipulated. Their purity and stylistic consistency are abundant proof that, here at least, it is the terroir that is speaking.
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