“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” quoth Ralph Waldo Emerson. I assume he was speaking to a copy editor at the time. In any case, I was thinking about my own hobgoblins this afternoon as I sat in a tasting for Le Clos Jordanne’s recently released 2008 vintage.
As I have written before, Le Clos Jordanne is one of Ontario’s top shelf wineries. The ambitious minds behind Le Clos are attempting to remake Niagara in the image of Burgundy, France. They do this by a painstaking attention to detail, a reliance on Pinot Noir (as their only red) and Chardonnay (as their only white), and most of all, by emphasizing terroir. Terroir is the unique flavour imparted to a wine by the soil, topography and climate of a specific vineyard. Le Clos’ wines are crafted in order to isolate the character of each of their four vineyards.
But an obsession with terroir can have consequences. “You can’t have terroir differentiation without vintage variation,” said Thomas Bachelder, Le Clos’s erstwhile winemaker. In other words, the minimalistic winemaking that best reveals terroir also leaves the winemaker with few tools to overcome oddities in the weather. For instance, the 2007 vintage was hot and Le Clos’s wines were unusually fruity and muscular as a result. “We didn’t try to mask the blistering heat of the 2007 vintage,” Thomas said, “We just tried to deliver it in the most elegant package possible.”
On the other hand, in 2008, Niagara was warm (making the grapes ripe) but it also experienced lots of rain, leading to a dilution in the intensity of the crop’s flavours. “The humidity makes the thin skin of the Pinot even thinner,” said Sébastian Jacquey, the young French winemaker who took over from Thomas this year. As a result, the wines are universally soft and subtle. This may be a downside for those who like their Pinot with punch, but the folks at Le Clos see it as a victory. “This vintage,” says Sébastian, “more than any other identifies the terroir in a way that we have never seen before.”
Those expecting the 2008 Le Clos bottles to taste like any vintage before them will be disappointed. They don’t resemble the juicy and complex 2007s, or even the bewitching 2006s (which were also produced in cruddy weather). Instead, the 2008s are polished, soft and balanced. In my view, the rain had a moderating effect. The bottles that are usually the best (the wines from the Claystone Terrace and La Petite Colline) are blander than usual. But the cheaper bottles (the Village Reserve and the Talon Vineyard) are unusually refined and delicious.
In other words, these are not consistent wines. But as Emerson also said, “with consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” Next week, the Short Cellar will offer detailed tasting notes on Le Clos Jordanne’s 2008 vintage.
Matthew Sullivan is a civil litigator in Toronto. He blogs weekly here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column also appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca. Follow along on Twitter: @shortcellar.