| Score: |
97 WA.
"One of the high points of the vintage, Roulot's 2016 Meursault 1er Cru Perrières is extraordinarily good, unfurling in the glass with a deep but youthfully reserved bouquet of green apple, wet stones, citrus oil, white flowers, beeswax and fresh pastry. On the palate, it's medium to full-bodied, ample and satiny, with incisive acids, striking structural tension and a sense of elegance that renders this wine deceptively charming despite its tightly-coiled core and immense reserves of depth and concentration. That elegance makes drinking a bottle today a decidedly pleasurable experience—after all, drinking a young, tight-knit Meursault Perrières can sometimes be a rather brutalizing experience—even though the wine is really built for extended bottle age. Jean-Marc Roulot produced some of the wines of the vintage in 2016, a feat he has repeated with an extraordinary set of 2017s. The fireworks begin with an impeccably balanced and intensely flavorful Bourgogne Blanc and peak with a Meursault Perrières that will likely rank among the greatest hits of his career. Pure, crystalline and incisive, tensile but intense, these wines show the Roulot style at its best. Having tasted through the range with his team a week before our rendezvous, Jean-Marc told me that they had concluded that 2017 couldn't quite match the magical "extra dimension" possessed by his 2014s. And 2017, it's true, is tenderer, without quite the tongue-tingling, electric quality of his 2014 portfolio. In a sense, however, that only makes these wines more charming, and I suspect they will reward Burgundy lovers with broader drinking windows. Indeed, unless these wines shut down hard, it's difficult to imagine that there will ever be a bad moment to pull the cork on a 2017 Roulot. Even in today's overheated Burgundy market, it will be worth the effort to track down a few bottles of these magical wines." Wine Advocate Interim, Jan 2019 |