A recent vertical tasting of what was the most famous wine in the northern Rhône confirmed its extraordinary trajectory. A version of this article is published by the Financial Times. See Julia's tasting notes from the tasting.
It’s difficult to think of a truly iconic, historic wine that rapidly loses its reputation because of human tragedy but Hermitage La Chapelle is that wine. Wine was being made around the town of Tain south of Lyons in Greek and Roman times, before a vine had been planted in Bordeaux. The powerful wines of Hermitage were so renowned that Bordeaux wine producers would add some Hermitage to their wines to beef them up. Bordeaux wines that had been ‘Hermitagé’ advertised the fact and attracted a premium.
Hermitage La Chapelle, named after the chapel on the top of the mound of granite on the left bank of the Rhône above Tain that is the Hermitage appellation, was the greatest wine made by Paul Jaboulet Aîné, for long the most famous wine company in the northern Rhône.
The 1978, 1990 and 1991 vintages of Hermitage La Chapelle are legendary, and the 1961 was a wine so celebrated that wine lovers would drive all over the country to find it on wine lists. I have a sweet 1980s memory of ordering this still-magnificent red for just £30 in the Dundas Arms in Kintbury, Berkshire, and of savouring it to such an extent that I left my handbag in my parents-in-law’s car as they sped back to Manchester while we headed back to London. Today the few remaining bottles of it are offered at up to £20,000, though I’d inspect them very, very thoroughly before deciding to buy.
Louis Jaboulet ran the company until he retired in the late 1970s. He had two sons, Gérard and Jacques. Jacques was in charge of winemaking while Gérard, an inveterate traveller and wine lover, was arguably the most-loved and best-informed figure in the world of wine during the 1980s and much of the 1990s. If you wanted to know about the latest wine developments in China or Mexico, apple-cheeked Gérard could tell you – and if he thought a wine was good, he would enthusiastically share it with you. He seemed to be everywhere. The annual London tasting of Jaboulet wines, with those of Hugel in Alsace, another family company with whom they shared a UK importer, was a major event in the 1980s. An encounter with Gérard was keenly sought.
Gérard kept a firm hand on the many widely admired wines his family’s company produced in considerable quantity, some of them based on fruit bought from other growers – and not just in the northern Rhône. The 1967 vintage of their Châteauneuf Les Cèdres from the southern Rhône was another iconic wine.
But in 1992 winemaker Jacques suffered a serious diving accident and the wines started to lose focus, while the sudden death of Gérard at the age of just 55 in 1997 signalled the complete meltdown of an icon. Jacques and Gérard’s cousin Philippe took over responsibility for winemaking. In his magisterial The Wines of the Northern Rhône published in 2005, Rhône specialist John Livingstone-Learmonth expresses his frustration at the decline in wine quality and his inability to get straight answers to his questions about how Jaboulet wines were made. Answers varied dramatically according to which family member was giving them.
In the 1990s the Jaboulets had expanded their vineyard holdings considerably so that when Gérard died, the company was so valuable and the tax burden so great that his widow Odile found herself obliged to work 20 hours a week in the family firm. Gérard’s frequent travelling companions Jean-Jacques Vincent of Pouilly-Fuissé and Christian Pol Roger of Champagne had apparently long been urging him to follow their example and sort out the company’s tax affairs in order to avoid heavy death duties, but in vain.
I had the pleasure the other day of tasting 30 vintages of Hermitage La Chapelle from 1964 to 2015, sometimes bottles (or magnums) from two different sources. For such a famous wine, the variation in quality and style was extraordinary. Vintages after 1991 had none of the majesty of their predecessors, which had been wines obviously made to last. The 1967, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1985 and all four vintages from 1988 to 1991 were still going strong. But the 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998 and 1999, the immediately following vintages that we tried, were nothing like the vintages of old. The 2000, made in the year that Jacques had a heart attack, as his brother had had three years before, was notoriously bad, made in vast quantity without the usual fastidious selection, perhaps in the shadow of the tax bill.
There were family disputes, and talk of a sale was in the air. Of several interested parties, the Swiss businessman Jean-Jacques Frey, already owner of Bordeaux cru classé Château La Lagune and a share of Champagne Billecart-Salmon, acquired the company in 2006, installing his daughter Caroline to run it. Louis died at the age of 100 in 2012 and must have been as puzzled as everyone else by her decision to import barrels from Bordeaux for her first vintage when Burgundy barrels, with their different oak sources and thickness of staves, are traditional in the Rhône.
We tasted 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2015 ‘Frey’ vintages in our La Chapelle marathon and, not surprisingly, the 2007 was completely different from the wine’s traditional character, much lighter and sweeter with none of the savour of earlier vintages – although admittedly the weather in the northern Rhône in 2007 was less propitious than in the growing seasons of the other three vintages.
The 2009, however, showed some of Hermitage’s characteristically meaty concentration, and quality continued to improve with the 2010 and, especially, the succulent, savoury 2015 that should have a very long life ahead of it. These new wines from the Frey era are very definitely more defiantly modern than those produced by the Jaboulets (who were no great fans of new oak) but they do carry the signature of this very unusual hillside. Presumably Caroline Frey’s determination to transition to organic and then biodynamic viticulture has had an effect.
I think traditionalists should be relieved to see that the wine is very much back on an even keel and bears a recognisable relation to La Chapelles of old. But I know many who were dismayed by Caroline Frey’s decision as soon as she took over to dispense with the emotive traditional packaging with its coloured picture of the chapel on the neck label and to completely redesign the main label. She has listened and the old livery was reinstated in time for the release of the 2015 vintage.
There are two major changes, however. From the release of the 2021 vintage at the end of August this year, Hermitage La Chapelle will no longer carry the Jaboulet name but that of Domaine de la Chapelle. A separate entity is being established with its own winery, designed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, expected to be ready in time for the 2026 harvest. And Jaboulet’s white Hermitage, a wine that can be just as majestic as the red version, is no longer called Chevalier de Sterimberg but is now rebranded as Domaine de La Chapelle Blanc.
And the network of international distributors built up by the late Gérard Jaboulet has been dispensed with in favour of offering what was once the most famous wine in the Rhône Valley, or the northern Rhône anyway, via the négociants of Bordeaux on La Place.
Gérard’s great friend was Gérard Chave, whose Hermitage is now often cited as the greatest of the appellation. Domaine Jean-Louis Chave’s website consists of a single page and a single line of text: Vignerons de père en fils depuis 1481 (vignerons from father to son since 1481).
Best vintages to drink now
1971
£395 Seckford Wines
1976
£390 Underwood Wine
1978
£660 Morgan Classic Wines, from £950 Seckford Wines, £1,000 The Wine Society, £1,200 Turville Valley Wines, £1,400 Nemo Wine Cellars, £1,980 Bordeaux Index
1982
£160 The Wine Cru, £170 Wine Owners Exchange, £215 Nemo Wine Cellars, £399.95 Secret Bottle Shop
1988
£125 Richard Kihl, £240 Hedonism, £252 Four Walls
1990
£490 The Wine Society, £630 Brunswick Fine Wines, £655 In Vino Veritas, £700 Hedonism
1991
£180 Morgan Classic Wines, £234 Nickolls & Perks, from £311.01 Lay & Wheeler
Members of JancisRobinson.com have access to 156 tasting notes on vintages of Hermitage La Chapelle back to 1934 here. For international stockists, see Wine-Searcher.com.
Main image © Christophe Grilhé, courtesy of Inter Rhône.