2022 Meursault Les Perrières 1er Cru

Elsa Matrot pulled the short straw and accompanied me through the Domaine Thierry & Pascale Matrot portfolio. Our conversation kept going off on tangents, and somehow, between the Bourgogne Blanc and Corton-Charlemagne, I managed to convince her never to eat another croissant. It’s a long story.

“It was an early, sunny vintage,” she explains. “We started August 25, though that’s not as early as in 2020 that began on August 17. It seems normal to start around this time of year after a very hot summer, so it’s not a surprise. But interestingly, like 2020, we started with the reds in Volnay Santenots as the berries were ready to pick. We had a long 15-day picking. There’s a good volume in reds. We didn’t overproduce as we take off the buds, but the yields were still 45-55hL/ha and in whites, 55-60hL/ha. That’s what we expected after the frost the previous year, as the vines tend to compensate. There was a day of frost, but there was no damage. It was quite an easy vintage overall, and the fruit did not require much sorting. The berries contained a lot of juice, but not so much to consider saignée, and it was fairly easy to vinify. We did just two daily punch downs, as we don’t seek a big concentration of tannins. The whites were a bit rich, but in barrel they gained acidity whilst the reds gained complexity. The reds are all de-stemmed and aged between 10% and 30% new oak. When we have warm conditions, we try to keep natural acidity and try to pick around 3.3 pH. Historically, we have never used new oak for the whites. My grandfather used to give the barrels away to Michelot or Roulot and then buy them back after a year. There is also no acidification for any of the cuvées, another one of my father’s rules, and we did not chaptalize in 2022.”

This domaine is quickly improving under sisters Elsa and Adèle Matrot. The 2022s are perhaps the best that I have tasted to date. I was blown away by their Meursault Les Perrières, but don’t ignore their Blagny La Pièce Sous la Bois, whose higher elevation was an advantage in the warm summer, their very useful Meursault Rouge or over-achieving Maranges Villages. This is a domaine going place. Hitch a ride.