2023 Meursault Les Perrières 1er Cru

Elsa Matrot is not happy. Not only has she lost her mobile phone, but the road outside her Meursault winery is being ripped up to be re-cobbled, so that every ten seconds a truck blasts its horn. It’s a distraction, but fortunately, the wines are good enough to hold my attention.

“It was quite challenging because of the yields and heterogeneity among the reds,” she tells me as the klaxon sounds once again. “So, we had to do a lot of sorting. We decided to keep the best grapes, not the engorged and larger ones, so we sorted out 25-30% for some parcels. That meant we sometimes produced less than in 2022, and, in fact, we are 30% down on average. We started the picking on August 31 with the whites, followed by the reds, while normally some reds are picked simultaneously with the whites. Some Pinots were not ready for harvesting and the disparity between different parcels was high, which meant we picked over 17 days. This disparity depended on the permeability of the soils and the orientation. But we are quite happy with the result and the reds have good complexity. We cropped around 60 hl/ha for the whites, which didn’t make us afraid. It is more concerning for the reds.”

“The most challenging thing for us was keeping natural acidity as the temperature went up for five days, meaning we could only pick in the morning, even though we have thermoregulated tanks. When we smelled the [incoming] grapes, they were hot, and we preferred to start the fermentation directly. The reds had no punching down during 12 days in vat and the fermentation was quite long and complicated due to the residual sugar that had to be fermented before barreling down. The wines are matured in 20% new oak, whilst the whites were racked at the beginning of September. The alcohol levels are between 13.2% and 13.6%.”