2019 Domaine Faiveley Charmes-Chambertin Grand Cru

DEC96 Produced from 0.81ha of old vines in the original Charmes section, just underneath Chambertin, where the grapes have delivered an incredibly aromatic wine with ripe plummy fruit, exotic spice, smoke and mineral notes. This has a silky texture, but does not lack the backbone of the best Gevrey Grands Crus. Truly impressive.
WA93-95 Aromas of cassis, orange rind, smoked meats and loamy soil introduce Faiveley’s 2019 Charmes-Chambertin Grand Cru, a medium to full-bodied, layered and demonstrative wine that’s concentrated and succulent, with an ample core of ripe fruit framed by velvety tannins and lively acids. This is another especially fine cuvée this year. Jérôme Flous told me that Faiveley began picking on September 9, finishing by the 20th, and that yields averaged out at around 35 hectoliters per hectare in white and a little less in red. Comparing the 2019 vintage to ‘a more concentrated version of 2010,’ he admires—as I do—its vibrant fruit tones and refined tannins, finding it more elegant than 2018. The quality of the red wines chez Faiveley is old news, and for more information on this firm’s evolution I direct readers to my report published in the August 2020 Week 1 issue of The Wine Advocate. It’s worth underlining, however, how good the whites are these days: Flous tells me that he now includes fûts from Damy and Chassin in the white wine barrel program, and in the last few vintages, I’ve found the wines’ new oak component better and better integrated.
BH91-94 A pungent nose of reduction and wood is tough to read at present. Otherwise, the rich and caressing yet powerful and relatively robust flavors possess excellent size and weight along with very solid concentration where the abundant dry extract does a fine job of buffering the firm tannic spine shaping the youthfully austere and impressively long finish.