The Jouan name is permanently linked with Jacky Truchot, partly owing to Henri Jouan and Jacky Truchot's lifelong friendship and partly to the pair's rival bottlings of Morey premier cru ‘Clos Sorbé.'
Jacky’s wines were often ethereal though elsewhere rather slight, which is to say light rather than genuinely elegant. Henri’s style, sappier and deeper, as often evoke purity though of a radically different kind.
Purity possesses today a more explicit descriptive meaning than in the distant past and, in referencing Red Burgundy, rarely notes more than a wine's centering on fresh, clear (red) fruit. Older Burgundy writers, including most early modern and all pre-modern authorities, employ purity more variously though most often to describe the intense perception of vineyard personality through a particular wine.
What I love about this earlier usage is its emphasis on the richness of the observer’s subjective experience (apprehension of place) above her conscious desire to locate specific stylistic attributes (vivid red fruit). Domaine Jouan’s wines are pure in this larger place-centered way as are, for example, Christophe Roumier’s and Charles Rousseau’s. Mature Rousseau wines rarely convey purity-as-red-fruit yet strike us as exquisitely pure via the direct, unmediated encounter with place each invites us into.
2016 Jouan are remarkably pure in just this way. And, like many of this vintage’s largest achievements, the set is drinking beautifully now. We're given plenty of Jouan blueberries as well as the looked for nip of VA, but the full flood of Morey wildness is less expected at this stage.
Burgundy at its soulful best.
Cheers,
Jason
