2008 Bâtard-Montrachet Grand 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.

Jacques Lardière and Frederic Barnier showed me a wide range of 2009s during my visit in late June, 2011. Many of the jewels among the 2009s are hidden in the villages level wines, which I highly encourage readers to check out. I also tasted a selection of 2008s. The 2008s are quite fat for the year. Yields were lower than in 2009. Lardière made the decision to age the wines longer on their lees to give them more richness, which he felt was lacking because of the inconsistent, high acid vintage. As a result, these are fairly big 2008s.

This may have been the hardest set of 2008s to taste on my late spring tour owing to the fact that the wines had been bottled recently, and a number of them were showing their acidity. Interestingly, winemaker Jacques Lardiere, who normally blocks a percentage of the malolactic fermentation to retain vibrancy in his white wines, reported that nearly 100% of the malos took place. I would not have guessed this from the wines I tasted, although the appley aromas often shown by the Jadot whites in the early going were mostly absent in the 2008s. "We had hazelnut aromas in the wines from the start," he told me, "which means that the perception of the tartaric acidity is adequate." These wines spent a long time on their lees, but Lardiere is not a fan of batonnage. He agreed with me that they were in a very tight phase, and needed to integrate their acidity, but still thought that consumers could start to enjoy most of the premier crus by 2012 or 2013.