2011 Meursault Charmes 1er Cru

Jean-Pierre Latour described 2012 as difficult in the vineyards and in the winery."The vines were tired by the time of the harvest," he told me, "so our concern from the start was whether we could keep fresh fruit in the wines.It was necessary to do a more severe debourbage than usual to eliminate any hail taste, but that left us with less solid material to facilitate the fermentations, especially the malos.Also, few people were willing to make a small crop even smaller by strict selection, but you really needed to start with clean juice.We had a lot of tartaric acidity but little malic, so the malos have barely started today.Still, we were lucky that the alcoholic fermentations were long in spite of the lowish acidity."The 2012s were totally cloudy and in the early stages of their malolactic fermentations at the beginning of June (several of them also showed a bitter edge, due in part to high levels of carbonic gas), so I will have to wait to report on them next year in bottle.With the 2011s, noted Latour, the wines changed in a positive way during and after the malos.After the August racking he took 80% of the lees into the tanks and the wines took on more richness there.He eventually bottled the '11s about a month and a half earlier than usual--in January and February of this year.

Jean-Pierre Latour was a bit of a contrarian on the subject of the 2010 whites, noting that without a high level of CO2 in the wines at bottling, as well as healthy levels of sulfur, the wines might have been a bit limp owing to the volume and flesh of the vintage."We want wines that are fresh on the attack," he explained.But he is nonetheless high on the vintage, describing it as "a vintage for the serious connoisseur," with a number of his wines combining two or three grams of residual sugar with strong acidity.The 2011s here also have very healthy acid levels and low pHs; they had been sulfited about three weeks before my visit, after the end of the malos.Latour told me no longer returns the wines to barrel after the August racking, choosing instead to leave them in tank for six months.He's looking for precision of terroir and he's afraid that "aromatic purity and precision may be lost in exchange for more richness, even though I realize that the bottled wines will now be harder at the outset."Latour's precision in the cellar is reflected by the fact that he affixes a wine label (i.e., Meursault Perrieres) to every single barrel, and the staples are in the exact same position in the corners of each label.