2014 Meursault Tessons Clos de Mon Plaisir

Jean-Baptiste Bouzereau considers 2014 to be “a complete vintage, with fresh, floral fruit, plenty of flesh and finesse, and crunchy in the mouth.” His alcoholic fermentations are generally protracted and he does a short débourbage, bringing four or five liters of lees into each barrique. As the wines spend so much time in suspension during fermentation, he doesn’t believe they need to be further enriched via batonnage. When I asked Bouzereau about his estate’s experiences with premature oxidation, he noted that the 1999s and 2000s were bottled with what he described as “tender corks” that had been treated with peroxide. At the time, the estate's wines were also bottled early, with lower levels of SO2. After 2002, he went to later bottling. Most of the 2014s were only racked into tanks in December of 2015, then bottled the following month.

Jean-Marc Roulot expressed a clear preference for 2014 over 2015, as he loves the precision and energy of the earlier vintage. The '14s went into bottle in February and March with moderate alcohol levels between 12.4% and 12.8%, with no chaptalization. Roulot describes his 2014s as more classic than his 2012s, which he said are "very concentrated but a bit high in acidity--great but atypical. The 2014s will age for a long time on their low yields and energy."