News from the Vineyard - Domaine Jean-Louis Chave
by Raj Vaidya
July 7, 2022
I’ve been visiting Jean-Louis Chave to taste his wines for well over a decade now, and it is always a magical experience; the wines are, of course, spectacular, but spending time with him and learning from him is at least as important and pleasurable as the great bottles he opens. When I first visited in the beginning of the last decade, he took me to see the vines he was planting in Le Chalet, a hillside which had last been planted pre-phylloxera and which he acquired in the late 90’s. He cleared a dense forest that had taken over the Roman era terraces all over the hillside, built roads to access the top and then started planting vines from the top terraces working his way towards the bottom. It has been an epic task which he began in 1999, and as of this past spring, he finally has finished planting the hillside. I walked the vineyard with him last Monday morning and wanted to share some of the photos and stories he told me…
Jean-Louis describes how his team plows the soil in such steep terrain.
In the short clip above he explains how plowing the soil is a two person job: one controls a winch (effectively a machine which pulls a wire connected to the plow) at the top of the row and the other directs the plow uphill as the wire pulls it uphill. Extremely time consuming, and very difficult work! The picture below, featuring Jean-Louis and the scholars I was hosting via our Sommelier Scholarship Fund, illustrates just how steep the vineyard is…
You can see the terracing work that has gone into this project involves stone walls, akin to what the Romans would have built, complete with nooks carved into them by the masons which give local fauna a place to nest. Jean-Louis believes it is vital that the vineyard has a strong biodiversity, as monoculture is something he sees as unnatural and out of balance otherwise.
Each section of vines has been planted after the terraces and walls have been completed, beginning in the spring of ‘99. This shot gives a good sense of the diversity of exposures on this hill also, adding to the complex nature of the wines produced from here. Younger parcels are all going into the J.L. Chave Séléctions bottling, meaning that this 22 year endeavor has mostly produced a fairly inexpensive wine, a great value indeed!
At the foot of the Chalet hill, close to the Rhône river but directly beneath the valley of which Chalet sits at the edge is the Clos Florentin vineyard and garden. This property was purchased with the Chalet hill and used to be contiguous and planted to the vine in Roman times as well, but unlike the hillsides which were abandoned post phylloxera this vineyard was continued by the previous ownership, and so has the benefit of a lot of old (100 plus) year old vines. It is from here that Jean-Louis selects his ‘massale’ vine genetics to plant in all his vineyards, especially the Chalet. He also has redeveloped the gardens on the property to promote the effects of biodiversity. Below, a few pictures will give you a bit of a window into this magical place…
Extremely old vines in the Clos Florentin, which Jean-Louis starting bottling separately in 2016. The hill of Le Chalet is in the backdrop.
Giant artichoke flowers!
Dahlia in full bloom
Lots of dahlias!
