2006 Domaine Roulot Meursault Les Perrières 1er Cru

Exotic orange liqueur on the very ripe nose. Fat and sweet in the mouth, with a distinctly opulent texture for young Perrieres. A sweet flavor of candied orange is leavened by wet stone, with a mineral component providing lift and standing in for lowish acidity. I find this less sharply delineated than the Charmes and more influenced by the vintage.

Pure aromas of lemon, orange oil and hazelnut. Lively and firm, offering a lovely combination of volume and classic dryness. Comes across as quite noble thanks to its minerally cut. Very suave, archetypical Meursault, featuring an enticing balance of fruits, minerals and sound acidity. This silky wine already shows a lot of personality. Will earn a score at the high end of my projected range if the last months of elevage bring more length.

Roulot’s 2006 Meursault Perrieres offers an effusively floral nose and opulently ripe pit fruit flavors playing against saline, savory as well as crushed stone suggestions of minerality. With outstanding concentration and a polished texture, this offers a truly dynamic interplay of flavors, finishing with a refreshing and invigorating meld of high-toned herbal and floral essences, vivacious citricity, fresh pit fruits, and wet stone. As fine as it is, this 2006 will not achieve the complexity or aging potential of the wonderfully layered, rich, mysteriously mineral, savory 2005 – one of the finest white Burgundies of its vintage.||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. Wine Advocate.December, 2008