It’s difficult to think of an iconic, historic wine that suddenly lost its reputation because of human tragedy, but Hermitage La Chapelle is that wine. Wine was being made around the town of Tain, south of Lyon, in Greek and Roman times, before a vine had been planted in Bordeaux. In the 19th century, the powerful wines of Hermitage were so renowned that Bordeaux 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 is named after the chapel on the top of the mound of granite on the left bank of the Rhône that is the Hermitage appellation. It was the greatest wine made by Paul Jaboulet Aîné, which was for a long time 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 so celebrated that wine lovers would drive all over the country to find it on wine lists. I have a memory of ordering this still-magnificent red in the 1980s for just £30 in the Dundas Arms in Kintbury, and savouring it to such an extent that I left my handbag in my parents-in-law’s car, only realising long after they had driven back to Manchester. Today, the few remaining bottles of it are offered at up to €20,000.
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, and Gérard, an inveterate traveller and wine connoisseur, was one of the most loved and best informed figures in the wine world 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 share it with you. He seemed to be everywhere. The annual London tasting of Jaboulet wines 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 produced. And they produced them in considerable quantity, some based on fruit bought from other growers and not just in the northern Rhône. The 1967 vintage of their Châteauneuf Les Cèdres from the south, for instance, was another iconic wine.
In 1992, Jacques suffered a serious diving accident and had to take a step back from winemaking, after which the wines started to lose focus. In 1997, the sudden death of Gérard from a heart attack at the age of just 55 signalled a complete meltdown of Hermitage La Chapelle.
In his magisterial book The Wines of the Northern Rhône (2005), Rhône specialist John Livingstone-Learmonth expressed his frustration at the decline in wine quality and his inability to get straight answers as to how Jaboulet wines were made. Explanations apparently varied dramatically depending on which family member was giving them.
In the 1990s, the Jaboulets had expanded their vineyard holdings so considerably that, when Gérard died, the company was so valuable and the tax burden so great that Gérard’s widow Odile was obliged to work in the family business. Gérard’s frequent travelling companions Jean-Jacques Vincent of Pouilly-Fuissé and Christian Pol-Roger of Champagne had apparently long been urging him to sort out the company’s tax affairs to avoid heavy death duties, as they had done, but it was in vain.
I had the pleasure the other day of tasting 30 vintages of Hermitage La Chapelle from 1964 to 2015. 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 obviously been 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 were nothing like the vintages of old. The 2000, made the year that Jacques also had a heart attack, was notorious. It was made in vast quantity and, it seems, 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, who already owned 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 Jaboulet died at the age of 100 in 2012 and must have been as puzzled as everyone else by Caroline’s 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 the 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2015 Frey-era vintages in our La Chapelle marathon. 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 2007 was less propitious in the northern Rhône than in the other three growing seasons.
The 2009, however, showed some of Hermitage’s characteristically meaty concentration. The quality of the wine continued to improve with the 2010 and especially the succulent, savoury 2015, which should have a very long life ahead of it. These new wines from the Frey era are certainly 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, when she took over, to dispense with the traditional packaging with its coloured picture of the chapel on the neck label and to completely redesign the main label. But she listened to complaints, 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 Stérimberg but is now rebranded as Domaine de La Chapelle Blanc.
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.
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”).
Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com
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