Domaine de la Borde - La Marcette 2018
We drink a bottle of Chardonnay La Marcette 2018 from the Domaine de la Borde from Jura.
If you click through the entries in the blog or look around in our cellar, you will inevitably get the impression of a certain favouring of Riesling. This has somehow just happened and wasn’t really planned and of course it is very likely that Riesling will be a sizeable portion of the wines we will drink in the future as well. Nevertheless, I can not close myself to the fact that I want to break out of this one-sidedness more and more often. Not that I want to accuse the Riesling not to be versatile, that would be simply wrong and already by the great, different Rieslings about which I have written or will still write easy to refute. But the fact is that we are clearly more drawn to other wines than we were some time ago. And one of those themes we keep ending up with lately are wines from the Jura. Today we have a Chardonnay La Marcette 2018 from Domaine de la Borde in the glass. Julien Mareschal, the winemaker, farms about 5 hectares organically around Pupillin. The vines for this wine grow on red marl at about 300 meters above sea level. The grapes are fermented spontaneously in wooden barrels and then aged non-oxidatively on their lees for 12 months.
The wine starts quietly. We smell light peach and a bit of sea breeze. There is also briefly a pungent, very spicy tart note, but it fades right away. Behind it we find yellow apple and some buttery crumble with herbs. No fruit arrives in the mouth. There the wine is slightly creamy, has a lot of minerality and leaves a salty feeling on the lips and also quite far back on the palate. Somehow the smell is reminiscent of stalactite cave, wet, stony, mineral. It feels elusive right after opening. All these aromas become more intense over the course of the first evening and at the same time the wine becomes fresher on the tongue.
After a night there is more fruit on the nose, more pome fruit than peach by now. The wine seems so light, so fresh and yet it has this intense minerality and saltiness on the tongue. The acidity is nice, but could still pack a tad more punch for my taste. This is on the one hand personal preference and on the other hand with 2018 certainly also due to the warm vintage. In any case, it does the wine no harm. It lingers in the mouth forever and more than makes up for the missing final acid kick. Easy-drinking Jura Chardonnay. For me, this is saufwein tonight and another confirmation that I should drink wines from the Jura more often.
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