1996 Meursault Les Perrières 1er Cru

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.