2016 Meursault Perrières 1er Cru

Winemaker Nadine Gublin told me that she’s agreeably surprised by the aromatic maturity and balance of the estate’s 2017 white wines, noting that they have force and length but that “you don’t feel the alcohol.” She added that it was a hot, early year [the estate brought in its Chardonnay beginning on August 29] and that grape sugars were between 13% and 14%. But, as is often the case in Domaine Prieur’s cold cellar, the ‘17s were evolving at a snail’s pace and were not yet available for tasting at the beginning of June: four wines were in the middle of their malolactic fermentations and the others hadn’t started yet.

So I tasted the ‘16s, only a few of which I had been able to sample from barrel in the late spring of 2017. This later harvest (September 23 through 29 for the Chardonnay here) yielded wines with moderate alcohol levels, and Gublin was still in the process of bottling them at the beginning of June. “I’m just now finding the structure and a point of salinity in the wines,” said Gublin, who insisted that “even the frosted wines show finesse.” She considers 2016 to be a white wine vintage for medium-term drinking, noting that the 2017s are richer and more structured. “But the first 2016s to be bottled are still fruity and pleasurable, and not closing up, which is a positive point for the moment,” she added. I should note that Gublin considers 2016 "a truly great vintage for the estate's reds."

I focused on the 2015s in bottle during my visit to Domaine Prieur as only a handful of the estate's ‘16s had finished their malolactic fermentations. The '16s had not yet been racked and were holding a lot of carbonic gas, which winemaker Nadine Gublin noted is constructive for protecting the wines. She told me that they gained in density and aromatic intensity during the malos and that they were previously too tight and linear.

The alcoholic fermentations were easy in 2016 and the wines finished very dry, at around one gram per liter, Gublin told me, adding that the ‘15s finished with more like 1.5 to 2 grams. The fruit was picked mostly with potential alcohol at 12.5% or higher and some cuvées were chaptalized lightly. Although crop levels were seriously affected by frost in ’16, Domaine Prieur made all of their cuvées, some of them in tiny quantities. Incidentally, at the time of my visit, the estate was expecting a full crop in 2017 following years of shortages.

Domaine Prieur started harvesting their Chardonnay vineyards in 2015 on September 3, after there was "just enough rain on August 31 to wet the dust," in the words of estate director Edouard Labruyère, whose family led the group that purchased Domaine Prieur in 2008. This sunny growing season yielded grapes with very low levels of malic acidity and wines with 12.7% to 13.5% natural alcohol. Labruyère told me that he finds the salinity of 2003 in the young '15s and believes that the wines will be accessible in their youth but will need some time to express their terroir. "It's not a classical vintage," he summarized, "but it's a lovely introduction to our wines."