Champet and Jamet: Cote Rotie and more
12/20/18 -
Jamet is a household name, but Champet remains a bit of a secret. This may be, in part, because the wines aren’t Parkerian, as they lack the requisite gobs and toasty toast*. The conventional line is that little or nothing has changed at Champet - apparently much is as it was when Emile Champet first bottled his Côte Rôtie in 1967. This provides a link – at least for nostalgists like me – to some of the truly legendary old wines of the Northern Rhone, which are now only available for a small percentage of the 1%. Like those wines, Champet’s is not modern (for one thing whole cluster fermentation provides a bit more structure and tannin), and isn’t slicked-up with new oak, or fined or filtered, yielding classic, old-school Cote Rotie.
The wine merchant’s dilemma: how to taste something rare before it slips through our hands? Why, dinner at Racines with you, of course! Wednesday, January 23rd, 2019; we will try all of the wines on this offer, and probably an older example or two from our home stash; price and other details below.
*Parker (as published in 1997), was not impressed by the “decrepit cellar conditions” at Champet, but admits that “they are quite deceiving when evaluating the finished wine.” He goes on to say that Champet’s Cote Rotie is “the closest thing to a big Cote de Nuits burgundy”.
