2012 Meursault Les Perrières 1er Cru

Thierry Matrot's daughter Elsa, who will eventually succeed her father as winemaker, described the two-week-long harvest of 2013 as quite stressful, with the last grapes coming in on October 11.Grape sugars ranged from 12.2% to 13% but no chaptalization was done.Still, the average yield for the domain was 35 hectoliters, which was a lot higher than that of the previous year, which Elsa described as catastrophic."The hail on August 1 killed Puligny-Montrachet and Meursault," she told me.The very successful 2012s here are higher in acidity and more taut than the 2013s and will need patience.Elsa describes the estate's 2012s as "minerally, like the 2010s," while the 2013s are "round, like the 2011s, but a bit fruitier."Thierry Matrot never does much stirring of the lees, but zero batonnage was carried out in 2012 owing to the hail.

"We've never had 100% of the domain visited by hail, as we did in 2012," noted Thierry Matrot at the end of May, explaining that the August 30 storm was the most violent and destructive."Luckily, except for that storm we enjoyed good weather from August 6 until September 25, and we picked quickly beginning on the 19th.The 2012 vintage is about fruit, and it's to drink fairly quickly."Matrot told me that his top crus were perfectly ripe at harvest, coming in with potential alcohol around 12.2% and subsequently chaptalized to 13.2% to 13.4%.Like some of his colleagues in Meursault, Matrot considers 2011 to be a more classic vintage for white Burgundy."The north wind in August allowed the grapes to keep a good level of malic acidity and gave us classic wines," he told me."It's a vintage of comfort.Two thousand ten, in comparison, is for the true amateur of Burgundy.It's in the class of 1990 and 1985--a mix of the two in style."