2021 Meursault Les Perrières 1er Cru

There is a sliding scale of frankness amongst the Burgundy winemaking fraternity. On that scale, co-proprietor Adèle Matrot, who works alongside her sister Elsa, is so brutally candid that in a rare role reversal, I find myself trying to cheer her up. Her wines are by no means catastrophic. However, the truth is that this excellent and fast-improving Meursault producer was acutely impacted by the challenging growing season. Their wines took the brunt of the frost and all the travails that followed. They will be back stronger next year.

“I don’t think it’s a good vintage,” Matrot tells me. “People say that vintages were like this in the past, but that’s because they didn’t really reach ripeness. I don’t think the 2021s have longevity - they are fruity, fresh and easy to drink. I’m afraid that they will deteriorate after a decade or so. Because of the frost, we had different ripening cycles, and we had to double the work in the vineyard. We spent nights lighting candles for practically nothing. On top of that, it was very rainy, so it was complicated to do the spraying. We started picking on 17 September, a month later than the previous year. For us, we are unused to producing such a low volume. We had never made less than five barrels of a cuvée, and in 2021 we produced two under that. Finding pickers was hard, despite the low volume, because it was a late vintage. Filling the tanks was very difficult. The fermentation was no problem, and finishing the sugar and the malo was a bit late, especially for the Auxey-Duresses. But all the malos are done now. We racked all the reds just before barrelling down the 2022s. There’s no new oak used in most cuvées and just 10-20% in the Volnay and Blagny, everything de-stemmed. The vintage is too light to add lots of new wood.”

The sisters will fight another day. There are one or two cuvées worth seeking out, and I think their reds are better than they think. But the whites feel anonymous, scalped of what makes them special.