2003 Meursault Village

Winemaker Jacques Lardiere moves to the beat of his own drummer, so he can be depended on to buck the accepted wisdom on a given vintage. Lardiere will keep some malic acid in his 2004s "to retain some power." He explains: "We need to keep a bit of sharpness: this is the attractive part of the vintage." Lardiere pointed out that high levels of malic acidity in the grapes simply means that the weather was not perfect. I will wait until next year to taste and report on the 2004s (as I normally do), as these wines were at various stages of their secondary fermentation in early June. I focused on the 2003s, which Jadot had just finished bottling. There was very little malic acidity in the grapes of 2003 at the outset, and the wines did not go through malolactic fermentation (though Lardiere told me he had not specifically blocked it). Lardiere told me he added no acidity. In contrast to many of his colleagues, Lardiere used more new oak than usual in 2003-typically 85% to 100% during the first six to eight months for the crus-as he felt it was important to try to oxidize any oxidizable material at the outset. All techniques Lardiere adopted in '03 were designed to avoid getting exotic flavors. "Producers who did too much decanting of the must, who started with juice that was too clean, lost complexity," said Lardiere, who did just a 12-hour settling of the must, without extreme cold. "They made exotic wines that are just chardonnay, not Burgundy. And those who used commercial yeasts also witnessed a deviation in the flavors of their wines. It's necessary to keep the terpenes, the precursors of aromas from the earth," he went on. "If you lose these, you simply produce chardonnay." Lardiere believes the best 2003 reds from Jadot will age for 50 years, and he is confident that the whites will last two decades or more. Time will tell.