2011 Meursault Perrières 1er Cru

I should have known that the 2012 malos had barely started in this cold cellar at the beginning of June, because they had also been late in '11, '10 and '09.As the new crop of wines was impossible to sample, I tasted through the 2011s, with the last few wines still in barrel.Consulting winemaker Nadine Gublin noted that there wasn't a lot of malic acidity in 2011 but that the level of tartaric was healthy, so the wines didn't change much during the secondary fermentations.The estate-wide average yield was just 28 hectoliters per hectare, but more like 33 to 35 for chardonnay.Potential alcohol levels, according to Gublin, were in the high 13% to 13.5% range and no chaptalization or acidification was done.Gublin describes the '11s as precise, classic, easily digestible wines with good finishing minerality."They gained in personality from their long elevage and will be much easier to enjoy early than the 2010s due to their lower acidity."There has been no stirring of the lees for the white wines here since 2008.Gublin told me that the last year in which there were problems with premature oxidation here was 2002, and that resulted from bottling the wines with too much dissolved oxygen.