Nick, there’s always an invite for you! And man, it’ll be tough to help you slog through those Roulots, Coches, and Raveneaus
I think a good way to play the game is to go by the track record. The wines from producers like H Boillot, Roulot, Coche, and Morey’s Leflaive made in a more reductive style will go the distance; I have generally had very good luck with wines in that vein. (Side note: a recently tasted 2012 Martray CC seems to have started going in that direction too. A good sign.)
I may have an answer on why the 2007 Jadot Montrachet was so impressive vs. the consistent failures from Jadot we’ve experienced over the past decade.
Marko Premk from Slovenia sent me the review of the 2007 Jadot Montrachet from David Schildknecht that was published in the Wine Advocate (Issue 186) in December 2009:
From the site’s Chassagne side, Jadot’s 2007 Montrachet smells like an essence of fresh apple and quince laced with brown spices, lily, and
narcissus; detonates on the palate with an energetic interplay of fruit, flowers, spices, and chalk; and finishes with an uncanny sense of lift
to accompany its creamy richness and sheer extract. This extraordinarily seductive, liquidly floral essence should be worth following for at
least a dozen years, but unlike so many of its appellation, one does not have the feeling it would be a crime – much less a disappointment – to
pop a cork already in 2010.
Jadot is one of those addresses where I confess to having feared that the combination of this vintage’s marked impression of acidity and relative
leanness with Jacques Lardiere’s love of precision and merely selective use of malo-lactic fermentation might result in a dearth of sensual
appeal. And he is the first to admit that a relatively high proportion of malic acidity was present in 2007, along with a danger of vegetal
notes. But Lardiere took most of his 2007s all the way through malo, and my fears were at worst marginally realized. An overarching caveat is
that these wines received higher dosages of sulphur (25 versus 15 grams) at bottling than those of other recent vintages, and will – Lardiere
opines – take longer to shake off a certain pungency or hardening, but it did not find that alarming. As usual, I could not take time to taste
all of Jadot’s many bottlings, which are less numerous this year, in any case, than in 2006. Incidentally, the first vintages of Domaine Ferret
Pouilly-Fuisse under Jadot’s ownership and Lardiere’s direction – on which I shall report at a later time – are tremendously successful,
preserving and even elevating critical elements of the personality that has long wines from that estate so memorable.
Although David’s reference to grams of SO2 is a bit confusing (we think he meant milligrams and milligrams per liter), my best interpretation of the statement in bold is that:
(1) Prior to the 2007 vintage Jadot’s white burgundies received about 15 ppm of free SO2 at bottling – which is the same 15 mg/L – and is an absurdly low amount of SO2 to be using in white burgundy. From my perspective, it’s a virtual guarantee that the wine will suffer from premox.
(2) In the 2007 vintage, Jadot increased the the amount of free SO2 at bottling to 25 ppm.
25 ppm is still too low by today’s standards with today’s corks, but it is sure an improvement over 15 ppm. The disturbing problem is that I’m now back to wondering what level of SO2 Jadot used in 2008 and subsequent vintages.
I asked Dominique Mounier if sulphur levels have been diminished in recent years – a moot question in Burgundy. He told me that they have been increased at Jadot and attempted to put me in my place by adding that most wine writers have recognised the folly of too low sulphur levels … I am obviously not in the mainstream.
