Meursault En Luraule AOC 2024

A purist Chardonnay whose appeal lies in its clarity: clear fruit, fine minerality, no toasty note pushing to the fore. The texture is silky, and the wine needs air and time before it reveals its complexity.

En Luraule is one of the lieux-dits from which Rémi Jobard draws his village wines in Meursault, alongside Sous La Velle, Chevalières and Narvaux. A good two and a half hectares of village vines are part of the domaine's nine hectares. Synthetic fertilisers and pesticides disappeared in 1994, herbicides in 1998; today the rows are worked by hand and cover-cropped, no fertiliser is applied, and cordon pruning keeps yields low.

100% Chardonnay. Pressing is done at the lowest possible pressure over many hours: at least six hours for grapes picked in the morning, often overnight — a full twelve hours — for those picked in the afternoon. This way, only the finest must runs off, free of bitter compounds and unwanted phenols. It then spends around 15 months in 600-litre barrels from the Austrian cooper Stockinger, built from French, Austrian and Slavonian oak, of which only about a fifth is renewed each year, followed by a rest in tank. It is bottled unfiltered; stability comes from two winters of ageing.

Dense and deep, yet cool in its flow. Cool fruit and pronounced minerality lead, the oak supports and steps back, and the 13.0% Vol. remains unobtrusive.

Pan-fried turbot, scallops in butter sauce, poultry in morel cream sauce, fine dishes of veal and aged Comté.

600 litres instead of the usual 228: the larger barrel means less wood contact per litre of wine and a slower, more controlled oxygen exchange. Two large presses in the cellar are what make the hours-long pressing possible at all.