Global warming may turn out to be the undoing of the human race, but as long as there are still plateaux de fruits de mer to be devoured in the corner brasserie, there's an upside: how the weather's changing Chablis.
Village Chablis, lustrous, minerally and racy yet delicate, has always been textbook-perfect with oysters on the half-shell, but a little too steely for the sweet meat of lobsters and crab. But as the world heats up and vintages yield riper grapes and richer wines, more and more of the cru sites of Chablis, one of France's most northerly appellations, are producing wines with just enough ripeness and richness to work with everything on the plateau -- lobsters and Dungeness crab and mussels and sea snails and, yes, oysters.
Chablis is less than 100 miles from the outskirts of Paris, and it has traditionally been thought of as pushing the outer limit of where wine grapes can fully ripen. In some vintages, they simply don't: The region is routinely threatened with every potential cool-climate disaster -- frost, rain, hail and freezes . In recent years, however, climate changes have drawn this very marginal place away from the margins. Growers are now blessed with warmer, shorter growing seasons, and weather threats are rarer.
In some vintages, the character of the wines has changed too. Warmer weather means riper fruit, more ample textures and generally richer wines. "The most obvious change," says Veronique Drouhin, "is that the harvest comes earlier." Drouhin and her brother Philippe are both scions to the great Burgundy negociant house Domaine Joseph Drouhin -- Veronique as winemaker, Philippe as vineyard manager -- and have been watching the weather for more than 20 years. They say that the effects of changes in climate patterns, while rampant in all of Burgundy, are most extreme in Chablis: Harvest in their father's time used to occur in October; now mid-September is the norm, and August is not unheard of.
Nevertheless Philippe, who tends vines from Chablis to Beaujolais, continues to place his trust in that classic French terroir element, the soil. "The expression of a wine remains linked with the nature of the soils," he says, "Just because it's warmer, the character doesn't go away."
That taste of minerals
Chablis sits at the edge of a great geological formation known as the Kimmeridgian Chain, a layer of limestone marl, some of which is composed the skeletons of trillions of sea creatures -- a formation that stretches from England to Champagne, Burgundy, and the eastern Loire Valley in France.
