2016 Le Montrachet

The 2016 Montrachet Grand Cru is stunning, unfurling in the glass with youthfully reticent but already complex aromas of crisp green pear, mandarin, dried white flowers, honeycomb, toasted nuts and iodine. In the mouth, the wine is full-bodied, deep and powerful, with striking amplitude and volume, immense concentration and chewy structuring extract, its satiny attack segueing into a tense, focused mid-palate and finish. This is an austere, old-fashioned rendition of Ramonet's Montrachet that it is shaping up to be one of the three or four greatest white Burgundies of the vintage.

(50% frosted): Very pale yellow. Deeper-pitched on the nose than the Chevalier-Montrachet, offering multifaceted aromas of yellow stone fruits, lemon, lime, clove, hazelnut, minerals and oak char. Sappy and intense but a bit youthfully imploded, conveying a strong impression of salty minerality. But there's also plenty of fat here, if perhaps not quite the definition of the Chevalier-Montrachet today even if the level of acidity is healthy. For his part, Jean-Claude Ramonet considers this wine a bit "too easy for Montrachet." But it will certainly need time to expand in bottle.