2012 Meursault Les Perrieres

The 2012 Meursault 1er Cru Les Perrières has a clean and precise bouquet with crisp citrus fruit and plenty of rock. The palate is tightly wound with good tension, although it needs a little more chutzpah and minerality on the finish. If I am being honest, I was expecting a little more from this cru at this stage so let’s wait and see.

Crystalline aromas of white peach, crushed stone and saline minerality. As dense as a solid in the mouth but with terrific delineation to its palate-staining flavors of citrus and stone fruits and rock. Really reverberates in the mid-palate and on the extremely long aftertaste. Conveys serious weight without heaviness. Should make a great--and long-lived--example of the vintage: premier cru at grand cru level.

The 2012 Meursault 1er Cru Les Perrières has a clean and precise bouquet with crisp citrus fruit and plenty of rock. The palate is tightly wound with good tension, although it needs a little more chutzpah and minerality on the finish. If I am being honest, I was expecting a little more from this cru at this stage so let’s wait and see. ||Before heading back home after a week of blind tasting 2011s, my last day was spent chez Lucien Le Moine after Mounier advised that it was an appropriate time to taste his white. This is one grower whose advice I heed with respect to the timing of the visit. The extended time in barrel and minimal use of sulfur means that there is little point in tasting these wines in their primal state. “The white 2012s are the same combination as reds: low yields and accessibility, which was a trap. I think we are going to suffer when the 2012s are in the market,” he opined is his customary candid and forthright manner. “People will find them heavy and a bit over-ripe, like the 2009s were accused of. But this is because the whites were racked, sulfured and bottled too early. The key to the 2012s was the late malolactic. You know, our cellar was still doing alcoholic and malolactics last summer in 2013.” Lucien le Moine seems to be a divisive, micro-négoçiant as Mounir’s outgoing personality and outspoken views rub some fellow vignerons up the wrong way. But it is what is in the glass that counts and I was deeply impressed by the potential of these barrel samples. eRobertParker.com.October, 2014