2015 Meursault Charmes 1er Cru

Jean-Pierre Latour began harvesting in 2016 on September 22, with crop levels especially low in his lesser village sites. But some of his premier crus were also hard-hit by frost: Latour will not offer Poruzots or Bouchères from this vintage, and there’s much less Charmes than usual (but his prime holding of Meursault Genevrières was untouched, producing a larger crop than in 2015). Potential alcohols were in the fairly high 13% to 13.5% range and the malos finished by the end of March. Latour describes 2016 as “in a classic style” but noted that “nothing was as easy as in 2015.” The newer crop of wines has less stuffing than the ‘15s and Latour did more batonnage with the ‘16s, especially for the vineyards that produced larger crop levels. “The plenitude has taken longer to come,” he told me, and he’s unlikely to bottle the '16s early. Latour noted that he was surprised by the pHs (around 3.18) and acidity levels (in the neighborhood of 4.8 grams per liter) in the ‘16s at the end of their malos, adding that the wines are very well balanced.

Interestingly, Latour told me that, early on, he was more afraid that his 2015s would be fragile wines than he was a year later with the ‘16s. He did not believe that the ‘15s could support a long élevage, and he bottled them in February in an attempt to preserve fruit and balance. He also did less de-gassing of the wines at bottling than normal in order to keep higher levels of CO2, but finished them with the same amount of free sulfur (40 ppm) as usual, using "the densest possible" 25-millimeter corks. “The sun gave these wines their sweetness and fat,” he opined. He considers 2015 to be a more concentrated version of 2009, “but both vintages have an easiness.”

As I was in Burgundy barely a month after the hugely damaging frost of April 27, many growers on the Côte de Beaune were in a state of despair over the paltry production of recent years and their grim prospects for 2016. Jean-Pierre Latour, a major vineyard owner in Meursault, explained that “the entire economics of our business is up in the air. The younger generation has invested heavily in their vines and cuveries but it’s Nature that has funded these investments. With recent small crops and the major problems we face this year, morale is very bad now.”

As to wine quality, Latour has been outperforming the norm in recent years. His 2014s are outstanding wines that appear to be destined for long life in bottle, but there are also some glyceral-rich and highly concentrated 2015s at this address, mostly made from very low crop levels. Latour began picking his early-flowering premier crus and older vines on September 3, noting that these vines were affected by significant couleur due to wide diurnal shifts during the flowering, while the later-flowering parcels were less affected. The wines after malolactic fermentation, some of which finished in February but others in mid-May, had healthy acidity levels of 4.3 to 4.5 grams per liter, with pHs around 3.2, according to Latour. He was still stirring the lees every two weeks (every ten days for the village wines) and the wines had all been racked about eight days before my early-June visit; most of them had a distinctly cloudy appearance.