The spoit children of the vine world

Continuing my fun in Chablis…

I wheeled Solex through the gates at Domaine Long-Depaquit and waited for a few minutes on the wide gravel in front of the sparklingly renovated late 18th century stone Chateau for Matthieu Mangenot, the régisseur. This large domaine of 65 hectares is owned by leading Beune outfit Albert Bichot. Despite his corporate casual chic look and monogrammed shirt, Mangenot turned out to be very warm in a shy way. We hopped in his car to go straight to the core of the Chablis grand crus, on the northern outskirts of the village.

Matthieu Mangenot at La Moutonne with an electrical heating box:
wires run up from the box through the vines

I am going to see worse in the Cote d’Or, but these are the spoilt children of the vine world. It might have been cold enough to destroy whole vintages up here in the past, but does that justify the installation of an electrical heating system? The estate has joined with William Fèvre to do just that: the vines are trained along black wires as thick as pencils. When the switch is thrown, the current heats the wires up to about 10 degrees centigrade, enough to keep the vine from freezing.

We climbed carefully tended steps to overlook the wide bowl of grand crus from the top of the steep slope. These south and south-west facing vines only make up 2% of all Chablis’ vineyards. “It gets so hot in here in summer,” Mangenot said, “that we don’t let our people work here during the middle of the day.” Long-Depaquit is the sole owner of an ancient 2.35 hectare plot called La Moutonne (literally, the ewe) which sits astride the Preuses and Vaudésirs grand crus. It’s the eighth of the seven grand crus, with a label simply: Moutonne Chablis Grand Cru. The beauty of a complex system is that it allows you to stretch the rules.

The range we tasted, with la Moutonne 2nd from right