2006 Meursault Boucheres

Picked the first day of harvest, yet at his highest alcohol (13.6%) of the vintage Roulot’s 2006 Meursault Boucheres represents another sort of departure from the norm for his collection. Fat, creamy, honeyed, and with a slightly awkward milky note, it is finds contrast in the bitterness of toasted nuts and citrus zest, and certainly clings impressively, but lacks the brightness, refreshment, or refinement of the best wines here today. I won’t prognosticate for now as to its bottle potential. Actor-vigneron Jean-Marc Roulot bottles 16 different wines (all but three of them white) from his roughly 25 acres of vines. A partisan of clarity, finesse, and mineral expression, he began picking in haste four days before the ban de vendange. Roulot professes a preference for the style of 2004 (“It has an energy I adore,” he says) or 2005. Yet an excellent case can be made – and I think these wines eloquently make it – for the felicitous marriage of 2006 vintage richness and generosity with Roulot’s brand of restraint and his desire to bring out the details and fine points of differentiation between sites. And Roulot is surely the unchallenged master when it comes to unlocking the potential in a wide array of non-premier cru Meursault vineyards (albeit at premier cru prices). The best of these wines – as my notes below testify – are quite unlike others from their vintage. Roulot uses a high percentage of larger barrels, and racks his wines into tank for an extended period, which is the condition in which I last tasted them. Importer: Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Berkeley, CA; tel. (510) 524-1524