2009 Hermitage La Chapelle
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Tasting Notes
Dark blackish purplish crimson. Bloody and savoury on the nose. The fruit here – at last – is in the ascendancy over the fruit. Massively palate-coating oak. You can see how the magnificence of this at triumphing over new oak must have inspired them to treat all the fruit as though it had this ability. Very fine indeed. One of those wines where you can hardly imagine it is simple fermented grape juice. What talent! And it’s all in the fruit, not the winemaking. Great freshness as well as power and majesty. Suave and certainly not earthy, but it should eventually emerge as a great mature wine – though it would be a terrible shame to drink it too early, however seductive it is already. Not a brute! Streets ahead of the rest of the range. Jancis Robinson, jancisrobinson.com
Critic Scores
Average Score
Jancis Robinson MW
Robert Parker
More reviews and scores
The 2009 Hermitage La Petite Chapelle is better than some of the Hermitage La Chapelles made in the last days of the Jaboulet administration. Its dense purple color is accompanied by aromas of meat, cassis, blackberries and camphor. The wine is supple, luscious, sexy and ideal for drinking over the next 10-15 years. Dec 2011, www.robertparker.com
It will be thrilling to follow the 2009 and 2010 la Chapelles over the coming 40-50 years. Much more sexy, voluptuous and layered than the 2010, the 2009 Hermitage la Chapelle offers sensational levels of extract and concentration to go with notes of cassis, black raspberries, coffee bean, toasted bread and sweet spice. Beautifully pure, layered, and yet massively endowed, with sweet tannin, it will be drinkable at an earlier age than the 2010, but I suspect will be just as long lived. It's a true tour de force in Hermitage! eRobertParker.com.September, 2015