1998 Meursault Luchets

Roulot tends to harvest on the early side to retain acidity but has a light hand with chaptalization. The village wines in '99 are generally in the moderate 12.6%-12.9% range, with no added sugar. Roulot did very little debourbage because the lees were healthy, but then stirred the lees "only six or seven times in total." Still, he did a long levage on the lees because he felt that the '99 wines lacked flesh. The malos were finished at the time of my visit; Roulot planned to rack for the first time at the end of August. Roulot uses about 20% new oak for the village wines and 33% for his premier crus.

Like so many of his neighbors in Meursault, Jean-Marc Roulot told me he did practically no batonnage in '98 because he felt the lees were not sufficiently clean. The growing conditions during the summer were difficult, with hail in late April and again in early July, and the worst oidium in years. Still, says Roulot, sun during the week before the harvest led to a concentration of grape sugars and acids, and the small yields helped the ripening along. The pHs after the fermentations were higher than those of 1997 but still in the reasonably healthy range. As I mentioned last year, Roulot has moved to later bottling in recent years: most of the '97s were bottled between December of '98 and March of this year. At the time of my visit, the '98 malolactic fermentations had mostly just finished (a couple wines were not in presentable condition) but the wines had not yet been racked.