2002 Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru

As in the past, I focused on the newly bottled vintage of white wine at Jadot, as these wines take their time developing in this cold cellar. In fact, none of the 2003s had yet gone through their malolactic fermentations as of the beginning of J une. Nor had any of these wines yet been acidified, and winemaker Jacques Lardiere will almost certainly block a portion of the secondary fermentations, as he does virtually every year. Jadot picked late in 2003, during the first week of September. "Following the small rains at the end of August, we waited for the grapes to lose some water and reconcentrate," explained Lardiere, who compared these wines to the 1997s. Lardiere told me he considers the 2003s as interesting as the 2002s. It is worth emphasizing, if only for the uninitiated, that Lardiere does not craft wines to give early pleasure. That's not the role, or the birthright, of the greatest wines of France he maintains. The minimum time that real A. O. C. wines need to express their flavors and soil is ten years," he told me. It's a cultural right. "Incidentally, Lardiere believes that the best 2003 reds will be legendary wines; indeed, a few samples I tried at the end of my tasting indicated that they will be headspinning, liqueur-like pinots in the style of such hot years as 1959 and 1947.