2009 Domaine Macle Château-Chalon

The current vintage for sale of Macle's flagship wine is the 2009 Château Chalon, from a warm, ripe vintage that has produced a powerful wine with pungent flavors. 2009 has to be one of the most powerful recent vintages at Château Chalon, a year of great ripeness and superb concentration with notes of aromatic herbs (it made me think of absinthe!) and the young, twangy aromas of Jura voile. It shows these notes in a subtle way, as if the wine has the power to undergo an even longer élevage, still keeping its floral notes. In fact, when I mentioned this to Laurent, he confessed he had kept a barrel of 2009 to see how the wine would continue to age sur voile. The palate is powerful, but the alcohol is really integrated and unnoticeable. I think this could very well be the modern version of the 1989. This is a (great) bottle of wine that can age 40+ years. Unfortunately, 2009 was also a small vintage, and only 4,000 bottles were produced (they usually produce around 8,000). It was bottled in December 2016.