The Fevre 2008 Chablis Mont-de-Milieu – from purchased fruit, but this year picked by the Fevre team – smells of fresh lime and distilled raspberry along with alkaline, oceanic notes. Its cut, clarity, and brightness reflect not just the vintage but its relatively cool, eastern exposure, yet there is a richness of extract to ward off severity and a protracted, vibrant, shimmering finishing intensity that perfectly integrates bitter hints of herbs and fruit pit. As Seguier points out, these vines really bounced back with a vengeance from the savage hailing they sustained in 2007, and perhaps there is even a connection with high quality by way of the vine’s conservation of energy this year. I would expect this to perform admirably for 6-8 years. The 2008 collection fielded by Didier Seguier and his team maintains their recent streak of excellence, but in a reversal of vintage typicity, seems, if anything, more dominated by its acidity and minerality than the 2007s, and less effusive than many of its vintage. Between poor flowering and dehydration, the crop was down around 20% in 2008 even from that of its hail-trimmed predecessor. The wines as usual were racked from barrel after malo (which this year, meant in April); some were bottled during the summer but the grand crus and most of the premier crus were bottled last November and December. Several of the wines that I tasted (noted in the text, and of course labeled without the word “domaine”) incorporate purchased fruit, but beginning with this vintage, the Fevre team not only calls the shots but does the picking for all of the grapes that inform wines labeled with their name. Like Hugel in Alsace, Fevre has been impressed enough with the new generation of DIAM composite corks to adopt them for a majority of their bottlings, in fact with this vintage for everything save grand cru – so let’s hope their confidence is well-placed! It perhaps also bears repeating that in my opinion there isn’t a track record for aging yet that one can apply to Fevre’s last three collections, the quality having improved too much to extrapolate with any reliably from previous vintages, so please take my prognoses as intuitive hunches. Importer: Henriot, Inc, New York, NY; tel. (212) 605-6706