Domaine des Comtes Lafon Meursault Perrières 1984-2014

BY STEPHEN TANZER | DECEMBER  23, 2019

As veteran International Wine Cellar readers may recall, in 1999 I published a vertical tasting of Domaine des Comtes Lafon’s Meursault Charmes, this celebrated estate’s largest-scaled and most powerful Meursault premier cru—and the Lafon white wine best known to collectors owing to the size of this holding (1.7 hectares). My tasting took place during more innocent times, before premature oxidation (aka premox, or the pox) had yet been identified as a thing, much less a grave threat to the reputation of white Burgundy—and an issue in numerous other winegrowing regions. This past spring, 20 years later, Dominique Lafon presented an extensive and splendid line-up of his Meursault Perrières.

The issue of premox was first detected and remarked on in the mid-2000s, when collectors began opening serious cru bottlings from the 1995 and 1996 vintages and finding them unexpectedly advanced, if not dark gold in color or totally oxidized. Since that time, the pox has shown up in countless cellars, and very few vintages have been essentially immune to problems (one notable exception is the freakishly hot, early, low-acid 2003 vintage, whose wines appear to be as bulletproof as they are atypical). Today, most white Burgundy producers, when specifically asked, will name vintages or wines that have been plagued by unacceptably high failure rates, although many of them continue to insist that these problems are mostly the result of faulty corks. But one by one, they are taking a host of measures to bottle wines that are more resistant to premature oxidation. In my article on Domaine Leflaive’s Chevalier-Montrachet published on Vinous in September, for example, I discussed the many changes that Brice de la Morandière has made to minimize the risk of premox since taking over that estate as managing partner in 2015.

Dominique Lafon has been investigating the pox and taking measures to thwart it for well over a decade. As we tasted through his Perrières vintages, we discussed this issue in considerable detail, and I’ve had further conversations with Lafon by telephone in recent weeks. I should make two things clear up front. First, Lafon’s extraordinary candor and generosity have enabled me to go into this subject in some detail in this article. Lafon and his estate manager Stéphane Thibodaux have been among the most proactive producers in Burgundy in the amount of research they have done into the various possible causes of premox and the significant steps they have taken to prevent it. Virtually all of the changes he has made in recent years should be strongly considered by most other producers of white Burgundy, if they have not already been implemented. And, as with the wines of Domaine Leflaive, the changes that Lafon has already made leave me confident that the estate’s best wines are yet to come.

I must also point out that in my vertical Perrières tasting this past spring, Lafon uncorked the bottles I would be tasting in front of me. That has not necessarily been the case at my other vertical tastings of white Burgundies over the last couple of years; in some instances, no doubt, the bottles were sampled in advance, so I really had no way of knowing if a particular bottle I tasted was the first, second or seventh opened by the estate. And in the course of my tasting at Domaine Lafon, I did not encounter a single premoxed wine, although Lafon did not present the 1999 Perrières, a vintage that he considers his most problematic since he took over his estate in the ‘80s. Only a couple of vintages more recent than the 1999 were less vibrant than they should have been.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. First some background, before I return to the wines.