2022 Meursault Rougeots

Raphael Coche greeted me at the winery just outside Meursault village. Before tasting his 2022s (since, like Olivier Lamy and Domaine Leflaive, they no longer show the wines in barrel), we ventured out into the vines for a brief inspection of his cover crops. As you might expect, Coche is fastidious about which cover crops he uses. He has a machine that “shoots” the seeds exactly 60 mm into the earth, a mixture of different sized bulbs, to make sure that the pedicule can take leaf over the surface. They intentionally use cover crops that do not grow too high, mainly types of edible salad. Coche was his usual voluble self, ever the contrarian on subjects surrounding Burgundy. “The 2022 vintage was very sunny and dry,” Coche explains. “We saw a little hydric stress, but rainfall at the end of July regenerated the vines. There were two bands of rainfall, the first covering more of the surface, but the second penetrated the soil. I was a bit worried in July. I started picking on August 25. The wines retain the freshness for both white and red, which are quite tannic.” Coche-Dury’s whites are exceptional, which is not unexpected. Shrugging off the warmth of the season, with exquisite texture and nuance, they reach their zenith perhaps not with the lauded Corton-Charlemagne, but the dazzling Meursault Perrières. Amongst the reds, I was particularly taken with their Volnay Premier Cru that displayed a little more Pinoté than their other cuvées.