2016 Meursault Les Grands Charrons

Jean-Baptiste Bouzereau describes his 2016 white wines as “easily digestible—a vintage that will give pleasure early but also age well. The crus in particular show a nice balance of fruit maturity and ripe acidity.” The 2016 vintage, he added, was "classic in the non-frosted parcels." The Bouzereaus harvested with potential alcohol levels between 12.6% and 13.1% and barely chaptalized their top premier crus. Acidity levels in the finished wines are rather gentle, none of them reaching four grams per liter.

Jean-Baptiste Bouzereau described his young 2016 whites as “rather classic wines, a pleasant surprise after a very complicated year.” The rain in September—Bouzereau said 40 millimeters fell between September 13 and 19—really saved the harvest and brought better balance in the wines, he added. And quality here was more consistent than in many other cellars “because nothing was really wiped out by frost.” Bouzereau picked from September 21 through 29, with grape sugars ranging from 12.2% to 13%, chaptalizing the lighter wines by a half degree.

The alcoholic fermentations finished by the end of December and the malos in March and April (the wines had been sulfited three or four weeks before my visit). Bouzereau told me that since he moved into his current cellar in 2009, the fermentations have finished “dry and well.” He did more frequent—but light--batonnages for the ‘16s than in recent years, especially for his Meursault Blagny. The more important cuvées will be racked before the 2017 harvest and returned to barrels; Bouzereau will then fine them in tanks for a month before bottling them in January. He predicts that the ‘16s will be accessible in three or four years.

As for the 2015s, Bouzereau believes that the quality of the grapes and their high levels of dry extract will enable them to age well. “Some wines are almost tannic,” he noted, adding that he finds the colors surprisingly bright and pale for such a sunny vintage. These wines have alcohol levels between 13.2% and 13.5% without chaptalization. Bouzereau noted that his wild yeasts work very well and that the finished alcohol levels can actually be 0.3% higher than before the fermentations.