2006 Meursault Les Tillets

The Roulot 2006 Meursault Tillets is even brighter and more precise and penetrating – as well as finer-grained – than the Vireuils or Meix Chavaux. The trade-off is less overt sweetness of ripe fruit, but this boasts hauntingly persistent floral perfume and a Chablis-like savory minerality reminiscent of shrimp or lobster shell reduction. I expect this or the Meix Chavaux will age nicely for 6-8 years. 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