2013 Meursault Perrieres

"“A ripe and cool but more restrained nose is also strikingly elegant with the same purity that virtually all of Bouzereau wines display in 2013 while offering up perfumed and airy floral, white peach, spiced tea and hazelnut aromas. The delineated and intensely stony middle weight flavors are poised and almost reticent yet the mid-palate is clearly concentrated and I very much like the underlying tension and exquisite balance of the gorgeously long finish. This is a stunner of a Perrières that should abundantly reward up to a decade of cellaring.” www.burghound.com

The 2013 Meursault 1er Cru Les Perrieres comes from two parcels, 80% in the lieu-dit of Aux-Perrieres, is very reticent on the nose like several others that I tasted during my round of barrel samples. It only reluctantly offers a dried apricot and shaved ginger scents but it is somehow “distant." The palate is medium-bodied with good weight, surly and broody at the moment, giving bugger all away toward the finish at the moment. It will deserve four or five years in bottle. ||Michel Bouzereau kindly agreed to see me on a Sunday afternoon after I was fresh off a plane from Bordeaux. It was actually the first time that I had visited his domaine, located on the eastern side of the Meursault village. |“I would compare to 2007 but with more concentration,” he opined. “The purity and the freshness, the 2013s are livelier than the 2007. May and June were complicated with lots of rain and therefore the flowering was late and I was looking around 30 September to pick. We actually gained some time and picked 26 September for around eight and a half days, with the reds picked last. The following weekend it just rained and rained. There was no rot and when we finished the harvest in Blagny, there were raisins with a high level of maturity, but the grapes were beginning to turn and show the first signs of rot. The degrees of alcohol came in 12.4 to 12.8 at harvest, with pH around 3.10: a little lower than usual with high levels of malic. We did a light chapalization and the malos were a little longer than the last three years but were finished by the end of summer.” |These 2013s are all deftly crafted, pretty Meursaults that can be irresistible in their youth, but do have a propensity to age. These are charming wines to enjoy, occasionally just a little too tropical in their youth, but consistently balanced and refined. eRobertParker.com.December, 2014