2014 Meursault Les Grands Charrons

Jean-Baptiste Bouzereau considers 2014 to be “a complete vintage, with fresh, floral fruit, plenty of flesh and finesse, and crunchy in the mouth.” His alcoholic fermentations are generally protracted and he does a short débourbage, bringing four or five liters of lees into each barrique. As the wines spend so much time in suspension during fermentation, he doesn’t believe they need to be further enriched via batonnage. When I asked Bouzereau about his estate’s experiences with premature oxidation, he noted that the 1999s and 2000s were bottled with what he described as “tender corks” that had been treated with peroxide. At the time, the estate's wines were also bottled early, with lower levels of SO2. After 2002, he went to later bottling. Most of the 2014s were only racked into tanks in December of 2015, then bottled the following month.

Vincent Dancer uses no SO2 at the harvest or "enological products" during vinification, and he hasn't chaptalized his wines since 2007. "I'm looking for a perfect reflection of the weather conditions of each season," he told me. "Two thousand fourteen was a precocious year [he began harvesting on September 10], but the wines are richer and more generous than the 2013s." But he added that he has barely tasted the 2014s to this point so he doesn't yet have a clear preference for the newer vintage. The malos finished by the end of December, which Dancer believes is largely because he does not make any early sulfur treatments.

Dancer describes 2013 as "a very typical year that produced lively, terroir-driven wines. Actually, the results were extraordinary for a rainy hail year with a cold, humid August, as the wines have density and complexity." Dancer picked between September 26 and 30, well before the most damaging rains in early October, and insisted that he had no rot. "But it was necessary to eliminate the grapes dried by hail on our vibrating table."