Meursault

Meursault is the largest and best-known white wine commune in Burgundy and it has no grand cru. That is the first fact, and like Nuits-Saint-Georges' identical predicament it is a historical rather than a qualitative verdict. Its finest climats are premiers crus, and one of them, Les Perrières, has been argued for promotion for as long as anyone has been arguing about such things.

The three that matter sit one above another on the same slope at the southern end of the commune, towards Puligny, and taken in order they are the clearest lesson available anywhere in white Burgundy about what altitude and soil depth do to a wine.

Les Charmes is lowest, on the deepest soil. It is the broadest and roundest of the three, generous and early-maturing, and it is what most people have in mind when they picture Meursault. Les Genevrières sits above it, on shallower ground, and is finer and more floral with more evident structure. Les Perrières is highest, on thin stony soil over rock (the name comes from pierre, stone, and from an old quarry) and it gives the tautest, most mineral and longest wine in the village, so much so that it is frequently described as tasting more like Puligny than like Meursault.

Thirty metres of altitude and a metre of soil depth. Nothing else differs. If you ever want to demonstrate to a sceptic that site matters, three glasses from one grower's cellar will do it faster than any amount of argument.

The second thing to understand about Meursault is that its famous character is substantially a decision. The village is associated with hazelnut, butter, toasted almond and breadth, and part of that comes from genuinely deeper and more marl-rich soils than Puligny's. But a great deal of it came from a shared set of cellar practices: full malolactic fermentation, which converts sharp malic acid into soft lactic and generates buttery diacetyl; extended lees contact with regular bâtonnage, which adds richness and texture; and generous new oak.

Every one of those is a lever, and from the 1990s onwards a generation of growers pulled all of them in the other direction. They picked earlier, used less new wood, stirred the lees less or not at all, and in some cases blocked malolactic entirely to keep acidity. The Meursault that resulted is taut, saline and considerably more ageworthy, and it is grown on exactly the same ground as the buttery version. The premature oxidation crisis accelerated the shift, since several of the practices being abandoned were also suspected of consuming the wine's antioxidant reserves.

This is worth dwelling on because it cuts against the way the region talks about itself. When people describe a village's character they are usually describing a consensus about technique as much as a property of soil, and consensus changes. A Meursault from 1989 and a Meursault from 2019 can be so different that a blind taster would not place them in the same commune, and no geology moved in between.

One footnote, because Burgundy always has one. Meursault does make red wine, a little. Most of the red grown in the commune leaves under a different name (Santenots is sold as Volnay when it is red) but small quantities of Meursault Rouge exist and are worth trying once, mainly for the pleasure of contradicting someone confident.