2007 L'Etoile Savagnin

The Montbourgeau 2007 L’Etoile Savagnin projects a tartness of apple skin and piquancy of lemon rind unusually strong even by Jura standards. Throw in some green rhubarb as well as saliva-inducing salinity, and you certainly have a recipe for invigoration. With the brightness, tartness, and piquancy on display here comes a slightly brittle, austere overall palate impression, and there is a sense of tightness for all of the stimulation to its finish. The impression of incipient energy as well as the formidable concentration on display suggest to me that this wine’s most interesting days are a few years off, and indeed that it ought to be worth following for more than a decade. But for now at least, it lacks the clarity or intrigue of the corresponding Cuvee Speciale from Chardonnay. Nicole Deriaux’s Domaine Montbourgeau began its viticultural life under her grandfather, whose vine legacy from the 1920s remains. All of the vineyards are proximate to the estate and within the L’Etoile appellation, which however does not apply to red or sparkling wines, both of which Deriaux also crafts. White vines at Montbourgeau are planted in a two-to-one ratio of Chardonnay to Savagnin, mostly in small, interlocking parcels surrounded by woods and pasture; but with the exception of a single bottling from adjacent stands in the same named vineyard, the finished wines are informed almost entirely by either one cepage or the other. Positioned along a small, winding valley, the various, generally steep parcels – while relatively uniform in soil (grey and blue marl littered with tiny star-like fossil sea creatures that lent L’Etoile its name) – are quite varied when it comes to exposition, a factor that plays into the virtues of assembling multiple lots. Vinification here is in stainless steel, after which the wines sojourn leisurely in older barriques or demi-muids, and are eventually assembled into foudre for further aging, with any given vintage and cuvee of L’Etoile being subjected to multiple bottlings, all labeled in the same way, so that tasting notes must be taken with a corresponding degree of lot variation in mind. Imported by Rosenthal Wine Merchant, Pine Plains, NY; tel. (800) 910-1990