Leuke maandag column van Andre Jefford

A few weeks ago, I caught up on the phone with Caroline Frey; she had pulled up at a motorway service station in central France. She was travelling, with her small daughter, between Tain l’Hermitage and the southern Médoc, as she regularly does – as proprietress of both Jaboulet in Tain and Ch La Lagune at Ludon. After the Freys bought the house of Jaboulet in 2006, Caroline (dux of the Bordeaux University oenology class of 2003) realized that she was in a unique position to recreate a little history, and in every vintage since 2006, she had blended a barrel of La Chapelle with a barrel of La Lagune (2008 excepted, since there was no La Chapelle in that year) and bottled it, principally in large formats. That wine, called ‘Duo’, is not as yet in normal commercial circulation, though Sotheby’s were given some to sell in Hong Kong last September.

Now, though, there’s a 10,000-bottle equivalent for us commoners. It’s called Evidence, and the first vintage (2010) went on sale this summer (at 22€ a bottle). It’s a blend of purchased Syrah from different northern Rhône appellations (though Caroline doesn’t rule out possible purchases from the south, too) with lots which would normally go into La Lagune’s second wine, Le Moulin. The percentage of each regional component, though, will always be 50%. The wines are vinified and aged in their original locations, then the Bordeaux half is brought to Tain for blending and further ageing.

I first tasted it in Tain a few weeks ago with chief winemaker Jacques Desvernois and winemaker Ralph Garcin. We’d just tried the fragrant, suede-soft 2011 La Chapelle: a supermodel wine, all poise, freshness and veiled inner sweetness.

For Jacques and Ralph (two Tain palates), it was the Cabernet component which took the lead in Evidence, though they said they might perhaps have placed the whole blend somewhere in the Loire. To me, though, it clearly smelled and even tasted like a northern Rhône Syrah wine – spicy, fresh and floral. What the Bordeaux component seemed to bring above all was a wealth of tannins and overall ballast. Evidence even seemed to have more ‘bottom’ to it than La Chapelle, though less concentration and aromatic finesse.

In other words, the historical roles had been reversed. Agreed, a Pauillac hermitagé would never have been 50/50, but in the old days a smaller percentage of darker Rhône wine would have stiffened the sinews of what was probably an 11% or 11.5% Médocain, whereas a century-and-a-half later it is the Médocain, if anything, which is doing the stiffening. Climate? Vinification practices? Selection of raw materials? No doubt a peal of change for all of these plays a role.

Read more at http://www.decanter.com/news/blogs/expert/587370/jefford-on-monday-the-doctor-doctored?slideshow1_110814#FIOsXDcZa6VAxOJA.99