CHABLIS 2018

First the good news: there’s lots of 2018 Chablis to go round. After the hail- and frost-imposed penury of 2016 and 2017, nature was munificent this time, filling cellars to overflowing. ‘In 2017, we needed 10 vines to fill a basket with grapes,’ says Christian Moreau of Domaine Christian Moreau. ‘In 2018, we needed only one. Two more days of harvest and we’d have run out of space!’

Producers took advantage of the maximum permitted yields, plus the VCI (volume complémentaire individuel) introduced in 2015 to allow them to set aside wine to compensate for smaller subsequent crops, but there was still plenty left over. Chablis has had large crops before, of course – 1959, 1982, 1990, 1999, 2004 and 2011 spring to mind – but nothing as big as this, with some producers reduced to leaving grapes on the vines or throwing them away.

It’s certainly good to see the region back on its feet, yet this is a distinctly mixed vintage that has given wines of variable quality, balance and concentration depending on yields, picking dates and vinification techniques. There are patches of excellence surrounded by expanses of good to distinctly ordinary wines.

2018 was the hottest vintage of the 21st century, surpassing 2011, 2015 and even 2003, with 16 days over 30°C in July and a peak of 38.4°C in early August. What saved the vintage and preserved a degree of freshness in the wines was the very wet winter, which saw nearly twice the normal rainfall between December and February. Reserves of water in the soil mitigated the effects of the torrid summer and a second crucial bout of rain, in the first and second week of August, revived vines that had shut down in the heat.

Impact on style

Laurent Tribut told me that he’d never seen anything like 2018, but other producers compared it to 1982, 2006 and 2009, in that it was a large, good-quality vintage. Others mentioned 2015, another very hot year, but said that the 2018 wines are better – ‘less