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  • 92

2015 Maison Valette Macon-Chaintre Vieilles Vignes

Burgundy, FRANCE
$89. 99
Bottle
$1079.88 Dozen
ABV: 14.5%
Closure: Cork

For three generations, the Valette family has lived in Chaintré, a small village on the border between Mâconnais and Beaujolais. They grow only Chardonnay on fifteen acres scattered in five villages. The domain was created in 1977, when Gérard Valette was one of the first in the area to leave the local cooperative and start bottling his own wine. After completing wine training, son Philippe joined in 1990 and then decided to convert the family's vineyards to organic farming, using biodynamic methods since 1992.

The Valette's are known for their specific style, wines raised with thorough lees-contact and without racking. They have remained true to this style of winemaking since the 1950s. It is a sort of family tradition that requires accuracy as well as painstaking detail knowledge of the indigenous yeasts and the wine’s proneness to develop reductive flavors. If the estate's wines through the late 1990s were simply powerful, textural examples of high-quality white Burgundy, the wines being released today belong in a category of their own. Complex and sapid, these are fascinating wines although you should be prepared to find wines that are quite different from any of the Valettes' neighbors. Anyone who appreciates the Jura bottlings of Jean-François Ganevat or the Thomas Pico Chablis wines is likely to love them. Valette's wines often benefit from extended aeration so decanting is recommended.

Other Reviews....
Vinified and bottled without sulfur, Valette's 2015 Mâcon-Chaintré Vieilles Vignes responds well to oxygen—in fact, it's best decanted—and the more air it sees, the less wild it seems. Opening in the glass with aromas of buttered orchard fruit, orange rind, smoke and nutmeg, the wine is medium to full-bodied, satiny-textured and muscular, with lively acids, chewy structuring extract and a long, sapid finish. This is an intensely characterful Mâcon-Chaintré that exemplifies the last two decades of reflection and evolution chez Valette. Any readers who find parallels with the wines of Jean-François Ganevat will be interested to know that Valette told me that the two producers are working with fruit that grows in the same strata of Jurassic limestone—though there are clearly technical and philosophical parallels too.
92 points
William Kelley - Wine Advocate (Aug 2019)