2016 Meursault En La Barre

I only tasted a few of Antoine Jobard’s 2017s (and will wait until next year to report on them in their finished form) as most of the wines were showing funky reduced aromas at the end of May and Jobard was not sure whether they had finished their malolactic fermentations. He planned to rack the wines at the end of July or beginning of August “and check the technical parameters then.” But he’s already confident that 2017 will be “a 20-year vintage” owing to the full maturity of the grapes (potential alcohols were in the lofty 13.5% 13.9% range).

Jobard is not convinced that the ‘16s will last as long, and he’d opt to drink them on the young side. He made just half of a normal crop overall in this complicated vintage, which featured a lot of rainfall and humidity—and thus mildew in the leaves—between the late-April frost and the end of July. He used no new oak for the 2016s, as he was afraid that “the wood would be too dominant and that the vintage couldn’t support it.” Grape sugars, he told me, were a degree lower in 2016 than in 2017, a vintage he described as opulent, but Jobard did not chaptalize his '16s. He told me that the style of the ‘16s was close to the ‘13s, “but with less acidity and more body. Both are vintages to drink in their youth,” he added. The ‘16s were bottled in March, as Jobard is now doing 18 months of élevage, one year in fûts and six months in tanks.