July | Looking Forward: Lavantureux
by Anthony Lynch
When I first joined the squad at the Berkeley retail shop more than ten years ago, we had only two Lavantureux cuvées to offer: Chablis and Petit Chablis—benchmarks of our Burgundy portfolio since the mid-’80s. Staff and clients alike adored the wines for their reliable consistency from bottle to bottle and year to year, as well as for the unmistakable Chablis character they expressed so vividly.
Soon thereafter—coinciding with founder Roland Lavantureux’s sons, Arnaud and David, joining the domaine—we began to receive new offerings: a few cases of the dense and steely grand cru Vaudésir, then a shipment of charming, perfectly balanced premier cru Fourchaume. The new wines showed off the family’s hunger to fill out their lineup with a diverse collection of more serious and long-lived bottlings, and they also took on levels of depth, complexity, and flavor intensity we had not yet tasted from Lavantureux, without ever losing their Chablisien typicity.
My subsequent tastings at the domaine with Arnaud and David confirmed that they, like their close friends Isabelle and Maxime Raveneau, represent the future of Chablis. Beyond the brilliance of each release—you’ll find layers of elegant fruit, pristine transparency from site to site, and Kimmeridgian minerality in spades in each bottle—it is their humble, studied approach to the craft that is most striking. Their judicious hand with oak aging, or the composed way in which they have dealt with an increasingly capricious climate, sets them apart in Chablis and beyond. The brothers’ new venture with Pinot Noir, which has resulted in a luminous, stony rouge from vines planted by their grandfather in nearby Epineuil, is simply the cherry on top.
The following Lavantureux cuvées have just landed in Berkeley:
More from the November 2024 Newsletter
