2016 Meursault Tessons Clos de Mon Plaisir

As has been his habit in recent years, Jean-Marc Roulot was reluctant to show his new vintage in late spring, as he believes that even wines that have finished their malolactic fermentations at this point cannot yet be accurately assessed. So I focused on the 2016s at this estate, tasting the wines with Roulot’s assistant Eric Baudin, who has been here since 2000. Baudin told me that the harvest was down 65% in 2016 owing to the frost and subsequent cold weather in May, followed by “a lot of maladies and mildew in the vines,” adding that the estate carried out 13 vineyard treatments. “July saved us and allowed the fruit to achieve good maturity,” he said. Roulot began harvesting on September 13, earlier than most of his neighbors in Meursault.

Baudin described the resulting wines as “savory and easy to drink, classic but not great.” He went on: “We always think of a complicated vintage in a negative way, but the grape maturity was between 12.5% and 13% and very little chaptalization was necessary. Although the wines closed up after the bottling [which took place between January and April of this year], they should be drinkable fairly early.” He noted that acidity levels are in the 3.6 to 4.0 grams-per-liter range, while the ‘17s will be bottled at 4.0 to 4.5.

Jean-Baptiste Bouzereau described his young 2016 whites as “rather classic wines, a pleasant surprise after a very complicated year.” The rain in September—Bouzereau said 40 millimeters fell between September 13 and 19—really saved the harvest and brought better balance in the wines, he added. And quality here was more consistent than in many other cellars “because nothing was really wiped out by frost.” Bouzereau picked from September 21 through 29, with grape sugars ranging from 12.2% to 13%, chaptalizing the lighter wines by a half degree.

The alcoholic fermentations finished by the end of December and the malos in March and April (the wines had been sulfited three or four weeks before my visit). Bouzereau told me that since he moved into his current cellar in 2009, the fermentations have finished “dry and well.” He did more frequent—but light--batonnages for the ‘16s than in recent years, especially for his Meursault Blagny. The more important cuvées will be racked before the 2017 harvest and returned to barrels; Bouzereau will then fine them in tanks for a month before bottling them in January. He predicts that the ‘16s will be accessible in three or four years.

As for the 2015s, Bouzereau believes that the quality of the grapes and their high levels of dry extract will enable them to age well. “Some wines are almost tannic,” he noted, adding that he finds the colors surprisingly bright and pale for such a sunny vintage. These wines have alcohol levels between 13.2% and 13.5% without chaptalization. Bouzereau noted that his wild yeasts work very well and that the finished alcohol levels can actually be 0.3% higher than before the fermentations.