france: burgundy
Domaine Alice et Olivier De Moor, Chablis
Alice & Olivier De Moor are a young couple in the village of Courgis, south of the town of Chablis. They met during an internship at Domaine Brocard in the neighboring village of Préhy and started their tiny domaine in the early 1990s from scratch—a rare move for a young couple in France, where domaines are typically inherited. They are passionately committed to quality. They severely prune their vines for low yields, harvest by hand, ferment with native yeast sur lie in one to four year-old oak barrels, and neither fine nor filter their wines (all highly unusual methods in this mechanized wine region). In a book of artisan domaines, this may be Vintage '59's most artisan domaine.
The De Moors make Aligoté, Saint Bris, Bourgogne Chitry, and two AC Chablis. The Aligoté comes from a tiny parcel planted mostly in 1902 and is arguably France's greatest Aligoté (it's chock full of liquid minerals). The new Saint Bris AOC is an obscure zone bordering Chablis to the southwest, where Sauvignon Blanc is the focus. It was granted appellation status with the 2002 vintage. The De Moors' wine, averaging 220 cases per year, is a singularly rich Sauvignon. Chitry is a village immediately across the Chablis AC border. In the De Moors' hands, Chardonnay from Chitry becomes a kind of baby Chablis with precocious aromatics. Bel-Air et Clardy and Rosette are their two Chablis, each a 2.5-acre parcel. Bel-Air is on a plateau and generally produces somewhat riper wines; Rosette grows on a steep hillside and makes for a classically stony, minerally Chablis. Rosette has come to be their unofficial premier cru.
Pierre-Antoine Rovani of The Wine Advocate has reviewed the De Moor wines numerous times with scores in the 90s, commenting, "God only knows what they'd be capable of if they owned parcels in Chablis' famed grand crus." Matt Kramer included their wines among his favorites of the year for two years running ('99 and '00). Andrew Jefford, however, says it best in his book, The New France: "Chablis needs more young, talented, and iconoclastic outsiders—like this pair of winemakers from Dijon whose small 6-ha estate is divided between Chablis and St-Bris. There are no Premiers or Grands Crus here, but the Chablis La Rosette and Bel Air are both from promising sites and are intense and floral, with more texture and depth than many Premier and Grand Cru wines (thanks to careful lees contact and the refusal to fine or filter). The Sauvignon de St-Bris is an old-vines cuvée with unusually vivid fruit, while there is also a fine old-vines Aligoté with far more sensual personality than most."
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