2010 Meursault Les Charmes

Another stellar 2010, the Meursault Charmes 1er Cru from Domaine Comtes Lafon is off the charts. What a wine. This is an especially great, great bottle. Then again, I bought it on release in France and brought it back to US myself. Vibrant and chiseled, the Charmes captures all the magic of a vintage marked by low yields and bright acids. Citrus, white flowers, mint, slate and crushed rocks race across the palate, building into the intense, mineral-stained finish. Magnificent.

Usually we feature older wines in Cellar Favorites, but given the understandable trepidation consumers have around cellaring white Burgundy, I thought it would be interesting to see how a handful of highly touted white Burgundies are faring. To be honest, I had a selfish reason for wanting to taste these wines. I bought many of the Lafon 2010s (it is my daughter’s birth year), but I did so not really knowing when the wines would be ready to drink or how long they will last. I think I can at least offer a view on the first part of that question, but the second, happily, remains a question mark, in the best sense of the term. Vinous readers will recall that 2010 is unusual in the Côte de Beaune for its combination of both elevated ripeness and high acidity, two attributes one rarely finds in the same vintage. At Lafon, the 2010s were positively electric when I tasted them from barrel and then from bottle. Today, a few years later, the 2010 whites are every bit as impressive. Although projecting drinking windows for white Burgundy these days is fraught with peril, based on this showing all of the 2010s need at least a few more years in bottle with the possible exception of the Goutte d’Or. The 2010 Meursault Charmes is everything Charmes is supposed to be. Soft, enveloping and generous, but with plenty of vintage 2010 energy, the Charmes marries soft contours with layers of saline-infused precision. The 2010 is pretty hard to resist today because its balance is so impeccable, but it should develop even more complexity over time.

(bottled four days before my visit): Deep aromas of fresh apricot, orange creamsicle, vanilla and spices. Big, concentrated and rich, displaying more power and weight today than the Genevrieres. Dense and silky-sweet but a bit shocked by the bottling and not currently showing the precision or length of the last sample. But this is still long on the aftertaste. Lafon notes that this wine will become more floral as it settles down in the bottle.