Followers of this site know I have a soft spot for Chablis and I enjoy the region’s wines frequently. My own experience cellaring Chablis has shown most Premier Crus drink best between 10-20 years of bottle age, or the point when oxygen has broken the wine down to the perfect balance between refreshing minerality and advanced aromatic complexity. This waiting game can be dangerous, as one never knows if the wine has expired until the bottle is open. Fortunately, I’ve enjoyed multiple bottles of today’s wine in the last few weeks and can attest to both its excellence and proper storage. 

The vines that produce this “Côte de Lechet” bottling cling to a 38 degree southeast facing slope. Daniel-Etienne Defaix owns and farms 3.5 hectares of the Premier Cru Clos de Moines here, plus a few smaller holdings in peripheral Premier Cru parcels. The average age of the vines here is 45 years. Production volume decreases with every passing year, yet the complexity and depth of the wines only increases.  The end result is an impressively pure and classic expression of Chablis terroir. 

The importer of today’s wine, Neal Rosenthal, is among the wine trade’s more experienced and eloquent voices, so perhaps it makes most sense to share his notes on the estate’s history and present practices:

“Daniel-Etienne Defaix’s ancestors were already cultivating the vine in the sixteenth century at the Château de Faix near Avallon, not far from Chablis. Etienne-Paul Defaix installed the family as vignerons in Chablis during the eighteenth century. Today, Daniel-Etienne Defaix continues this long family tradition as he maintains a domaine of 26 hectares planted exclusively toI Chardonnay and primarily in a series of vineyard sites classified 1er Cru. The vineyards are fertilized, when necessary, with a natural compost of cow and horse manure. Treatments in the vineyards are severely limited and never done within two months of the harvest. All the wines at this estate are vinified in a similar fashion. At harvest a strict triage is done to eliminate unripe and unhealthy grapes; the grapes are pressed slowly for three hours, separated parcel by parcel, with only the finest juice maintained for bottling at the domaine. The wines normally ferment for three weeks (sometimes as long as a month) using only indigenous yeasts and at a temperature of 18 degrees Celsius; the malolactic fermentation is always completed but never artificially rushed (on rare occasion, the ML has taken two years to finish). The wines rest on the fine lees in stainless steel cuves for at least 18 months (and sometimes longer for the 1er and Grand Crus) undergoing a type of batonnage without exposure to air and without the addition of sulfur (utilizing the CO2 created by the malolactic fermentation to conserve the freshness of the wines). The wines are generally not fined nor are they filtered prior to bottling and the wines are never exposed to a “passage a froid” to precipitate the tartrates … the elevage of two winters in a cold cellar does that work naturally. The Domaine Daniel-Etienne Defaix releases its wine to the market only after obtaining several years of bottle age at which point the market has the pleasure of having access to wines that more fully express the remarkable and unique terroir that is Chablis. Note also that the high quality corks used at the domaine are purchased two to three years in advance to secure the finest quality and to insure the stability of the cork.”