2008 Meursault Village

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.