Clos to My Heart
2008 Vincent Dauvissat Les Clos
One of the Only Parcels in the Nation
"... an utterly brilliant bottle in the making... deep, brilliantly complex and stunningly transparent... full-bodied, racy and very elegant on the attack... profound focus and grip and a very, very long, transparent and tensile finish..." - John Gilman
He's right: Vincent Dauvissat’s 2008 Les Clos is certainly an utterly brilliant bottle in the making, a grand-scaled tribute to Chablis in top form.
Today we offer one of the only tranches in the nation, at $129.95 a bottle.
While the 08s' footprints haven't quite set in the cement yet - they were just released earlier this year - it's already clear that these are phenomenal. Yes, 2007 was legendary in Chablis, and after stellar vintages, retailers and collectors sometimes seem to sleep through the next vintage with a hangover. If this is you, wake up: These 2008s can go toe-to-toe with the 07s.
If 2007 was all about high-acid electrical force touching down on beds of layered rock, 2008 takes that voltage and puts a rolling thunderhead of perfectly ripe, round, yellow fruits behind it. There’s more aromatics, more flesh, more push here in 08, all wired up with Chablis’ requisite acid and mineral.
Really, this is Les Clos as it’s supposed to be - dense, statuesque, nearly chewy it's so concentrated, and heartbreakingly mineral. Yet for all its grandeur, this doesn't parade as imperious or showy; like Vincent Dauvissat himself, this is sure-handedly detailed and calm with confidence.
As Andrew Jefford asks in The New France, “Do winemakers make wines in their own image? If so, who would you rather have make your Chablis for you than a pure-spirited vigneron? Chablis, after all, should be the purest of wines, limpid and uncluttered... That more or less sums up the Dauvissat style.”
While this purity, the delineation of each individual element is evident (and beautiful) even in youth, this is also very tightly packed right now; time (a decade to three... or more?) will be good to this, will open every component up, allow it all to unpack, stretch out and really blossom into its full potential.
Every year, we quickly sell through our tranches of Dauvissat’s Les Clos - this is, after all, the Granddaddy of Chablis’ grand crus, from one of the indisputable greats of the region… an extraordinary wine year in and year out. As this 2008 is certainly amongst the most impressive vintages in recent memory (plus the fact that our parcel on offer today is one of the only available in the nation currently), we urge you to act quickly… we’d wager that this may be a fast sell-out.
Please email us at
offers@crushwineco.com or call the store at (212) 980-9463 to place your order.
Ian McFadden
Director, Fine & Rare Wine
Crush Wine & Spirits
2008 Vincent Dauvissat Les Clos
Gilman, View from the Cellar: After the thundering close of the les Preuses, I was not sure if there were still higher gears to go for the les Clos, but it too is an utterly brilliant bottle in the making. The bouquet is deep, brilliantly complex and stunningly transparent, as it soars from the glass in a blaze of grapefruit, lemon, kaleidoscopic, flinty minerality, a touch of straw, supring flowers, perhaps a hint of new wood and a topnote of oyster shell. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied, racy and very elegant on the attack, with a rock solid core of fruit, profound focus and grip and a very, very long, transparent and tensile finish. A great, great vintage for the Dauvissat Clos.
Tanzer, International Wine Cellar: Bright, pale yellow with green highlights. The purest and most perfumed of these 2008s, offering scents of lemon oil, pineapple, mirabelle and white pepper. Wonderfully sweet and large-scaled, even a bit youthfully monolithic today, with a flavor of pure crushed stone. This boasts outstanding grand cru weight and a finish that saturates every millimeter of the palate. A wine that's still on the starting block.
*Note: Dauvissat uses multiple U.S. importers whose labels are different. Dauvissat-Camus wines are 100% identical to those that appear under the Vincent Dauvissat label.
Wine arrives Fall 2010
NET | No further discount