2008 Meursault En La Barre

As long-time subscribers know, I don't generally bother providing tasting notes on the newest vintage from this domain because the malos generally finish very late here and the bottling doesn't take place until nearly two years after the harvest. But this year a number of the rather low-acid 2009 barrels were already through their secondary fermentations by the end of May, and Antoine Jobard, who was concerned about the risk of getting heavy wines, seemed quite willing to show them. "There was a lot of material in 2009, although 13.3% was our maximum alcohol," he told me, adding that 2009 was a bit like 2005 in style. He made it clear that, to him at least, the 2008s "have more interesting acidity at the end of the mouth." But the very late malos in '08 caused father Francois and son Antoine to skip their normal July racking. In fact, the wines spent at least 18 months on their lees before being racked, as the Jobards did not want to put them back into barrel after the racking. Once the wines were taken off their lees, the Jobards simply stabilized them in tank for a month and then bottled them. The Jobards do barely a two-hour debourbage, starting with "dirty" juice but not doing any batonnage. This formula has clearly been successful, because this domain's wines have been mostly immune to problems with premature oxidation through the years. One exception was 1999, said Antoine, the year the family switched to a bottling machine (previously they did a gentle manual bottling). The bottling that year was too rough and the wines lost gas during the process, he told me. "The 375-ml. bottles we did by hand are fresher today."