2006 Meursault Poruzot

The Roulot 2006 Meursault Poruzots smells of grapefruit and lime, along with their pungent zests. Blond tobacco and a sweet, saline, smoky savor add intrigue on the persistently juicy, citric palate. With unusual firmness of feel and a brash, chalky, pungent finish, this is Meursault in a different key from the others in Roulot’s collection. He acquired this parcel recently and indicates that it needs some viticultural tough love to fall into line with its fellows. I suspect this will benefit enormously from 3-4 years of bottle evolution and may well be worth holding for twice that long. 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