2010 Blanc Savigny-lès-Beaune Clos des Guettes 1er Cru

Once again, I tasted with Jacques Lardière and Frédéric Barnier during a marathon session that lasted several hours. Lardière has been on a whirlwind tour celebrating his last year at Jadot before his long-announced retirement, but I will believe he is stepping down when I see it. Lifers like Lardière simply don't retire. As for the wines, Jadot's 2010s are unqualified successes across the board. Of course, the wines from the most prestigious appellations are often compelling, but frankly I find just as much joy in discovering the many fabulous Burgundies from unheralded villages that are sprinkled throughout this portfolio. Lardière and Barnier first thought 2010 was better for reds than whites, but that gap has narrowed recently in their opinion. Yields were down 15-20% for the whites (less than the reds), because of the December, 2009 frost and irregular flowering the following spring. A number of wines were chaptalized approximately 0.5%. The 2010 whites were bottled between February and March 2012. I also tasted a handful of 2009s and 2008s, which I have included here as part of my goal to revisit wines from bottle on a regular basis. I continue to be thrilled by the Jadot 2009 whites, while the 2008s I tasted are mostly equally succesful. Jadot fans know that this venerable winery is composed of several brands; Maison Louis Jadot, Domaine Louis Jadot, Heritiers de Louis Jadot, Domaine Duc de Magenta and Domaine Gagey. In the interest of simplicity, I have listed all of the wines in this section under Domaine/Maison Jadot. There are two cases in which a wine is made by more than one of the labels, in which case the corresponding tasting note indicates which wine was tasted; they are the Chassagne-Montrachet premier cru Garenne and the Puligny-Montrachet premier cru Folatières.

I normally taste the new vintage of red wines in Jadot's massive, sepulchral barrel cellar, where this marathon routinely requires three or four hours. But it was even more intimidating to arrive this year to see 55 sample bottles laid out on a table. And that's far from the whole collection of Jadot reds in 2010, said Frederic Barnier, who will succeed long-time winemaker Jacques Lardiere when he retires at the end of this year (I'll believe it when I see it, as Lardiere is like the energizer bunny.) Barnier noted that grape sugars were typically around 12.5% in 2010, prior to a half-degree or so of chaptalization. All the wines were racked between May and August of '11, and will be racked a second time for the assemblage in March. The wines were kept in roughly 60% new oak until the first racking (a level higher than that of 2009), and are now in about 30% new barrels. Barnier noted that Jadot started harvesting on the Cote de Nuits on September 24, before beginning in Pommard, Volnay and Beaune, because the vegetative cycle was finished and the skins were beginning to wither. Fruit in the Cote de Beaune required patience as there was at least two more inches of rain here in August than on the Cote de Nuits. Yields were higher on the Cote de Beaune, Barnier added, "sometimes too much for the year, and the wines are generally not at the same level of quality."