1996 Meursault Les Charmes 1er Cru

For many white Burgundy lovers around the world, the flamboyantly rich but beautifully detailed Meursaults of Domaine des Comtes Lafon are the yardsticks against which all other chardonnays are measured. The Lafons' Meursault Charmes is the best known of the estate's cru holdings, as the family owns a major 1.7-hectare chunk of this vineyard. Dominique Lafon, who became fully involved in vinification here in 1984 and has worked full-time at the family domain since '87, describes the Charmes as a big, dense, rather powerful style of Meursault and a wine that frequently offers early appeal. In aromas and flavors, he says, it is usually more suggestive of white fruit (especially peach) and less lemony than the Genevrières and the minerally, citric Perrières. Extensive lees contact and a high percentage of new oak accentuate the terroir character and bring added aromas of vanilla, grilled nuts and toasted bread._x000D_

x000D x000D x000D "Our holding of Charmes is in one of the best spots at the top corner of the vineyard," says Lafon. As one gazes up the hill, the steeper Meursault Perrieres lies directly above Lafon's piece of Charmes Dessus, and Puligny-Montrachet Combettes is just to the left. The soil is a fairly light, crumbly amalgam of marly, calcium-rich clay and rocks, but deeper than that of Perrières or Genevrières. Still, the wine produced from this soil is closer in quality and style to Perrières than it is to the less structured, more billowy wines from the lower portion of the vineyard known as Charmes Dessous. The Lafon Charmes derives mostly from 45- and 65-year-old vines; beginning in '95, a small percentage of replanted vines has been included in the blend, but most of the juice from these young vines is still declassified. Since 1992, Lafon has run the entire vineyard; for several years before that Pierre Morey sharecropped the 0.7-hectare portion of 40-year-old vines.x000D x000D x000D x000D x000D I tasted the following wines with Dominique Lafon at the end of May in Lafon's deep, humid cellar (still notably chilly even during a late spring hot spell), surrounded by bins of older, fungus-encrusted bottles. (Ex-Cellars Wine Agencies, Solvang, CA; Daniel Johnnes/Jeroboam Wines, New York, NY)x000D x000D

When I visited this spring, Dominique Lafon was concerned about the potential size of the '98 crop, following damaging frost and spotty hail in some of his vineyards in April (Puligny Montrachet Champs Gains and Meursault Clos de la Barre were worst hit). He was not planning to drop any crop, expecting to get 30 35 hectoliters per hectare, at best, at harvest time. Lafon has never had a trio of consecutive vintages as strong as '95, '96 and '97, and these three years are quite different in style. Lafon says 1997 brought fruit as healthy as the previous year. The berries were almost golden in color, he explains; they gave some of the pear and quince flavors of '89 (Lafon '89s were some of the standouts in this superripe but often blowzy vintage), but also had a better acid balance. The '97s had not yet been racked at the time of my visit. Lafon planned to keep them on the gross lees protected by gas until July, but pointed out that he does less lees stirring now than in the old days. Incidentally, following the '96 harvest, Lafon slowed down the fermentations in an attempt to get more roundness and fullness into a group of wines with a tendency toward austerity. He stirred the lees until April. In '97, he took the opposite approach, allowing the fermentation to finish relatively quickly and stopping batonnage as soon as the malos began in January. One result of these techniques has been that the '96s generally finished with 1.5 to 2 grams per liter of residual sugar (a couple are even higher), while the '97s are in the relatively low 1 to 1.5 range.