Les Miroirs I Need the Sun 2018 750ml

Kenjiro Kagami began this 2018 Chardonnay as an ordinary white; two years on it was still fermenting, and his remedy turned it into a six-month skin-contact wine.

Domaine des Miroirs is one plot of about 3.2 hectares above the village of Grusse in the southern Jura, with forest on three sides, bought in 2011 after Kagami had spent more than six years with Gérard Schueller in Alsace. The release letters he writes for his Japanese importer Vinaiota are the only detailed record of how each cuvée was made, and this one has a longer story than most.

2018 was, by his account, a year of severe heat, the hottest since 2011 together with 2015, and he says plainly that he does not chase acidity and lightness for their own sake; he wants wine from fully ripe grapes. The Chardonnay was pressed directly and started life as a conventional white, but after two years in cask the alcoholic fermentation had still not finished. At the 2020 harvest he took the freshly pressed Chardonnay pomace, destemmed it at once, added it to the 2018 wine and let the yeasts of the new fruit restart the ferment. The wine then stayed on those skins for roughly six months until dry; only the free-run was drawn off, rested for a few months and bottled.

The name had been used once before, for a 45-day maceration of the latest-picked Chardonnay of 2015, and Kagami says the two share a method but not a style. A second tank of the same 2018 wine was left on its skins longer, bottled with more tannin and deeper colour, and held back until September 2025; the bottling released in spring 2023 is the earlier and lighter of the pair.

In the glass

Kagami's own note at release, carried by Vinaiota in June 2023: although a white on paper, the maceration brings it close to a red in feel; the colour is deep and the nose rich and layered, showing cherry and peach in the manner of a stone-fruit liqueur. At bottling, he writes, its elements pointed in different directions and were only beginning to pull together. SAQ in Québec files it as a natural orange wine, 100% Chardonnay at 12% alcohol.

When to open

Kagami strongly recommends leaving it several more years to knit, but says that, unlike his 2018 Trousseau, it drinks acceptably straight after opening. The label asks for storage below 15 °C; the French retailer Terra Vinea serves it at 11 °C, opened a little ahead.

At the table

For the second bottling Kagami asked for food with some weight: autumn and winter European dishes, Asian and spiced cooking, even what you would normally pair with a red.

Quick facts

Provenance

Sourced from the Japanese importer.

Sources: Domaine des Miroirs (Kenjiro Kagami, release letters); Vinaiota (Japanese importer); SAQ; Terra Vinea; label