The 2015 Chambolle-Musigny 1er Cru Les Feusselottes has a winsome bouquet with copious red cherries, cranberry and bergamot scents that unfurl in the glass. There is a fine marine-like, seaweed scent that evolves. The palate is fresh on the entry with good grip. This is a solid and dense Chambolle-Musigny, nicely structured with broody dark berry fruit laced with black tea and spice towards the finish. It will require 4-5 years in bottle before it really enters its stride.

The 2014 Chambolle Musigny 1er Cru les Feusselottes has a comely bouquet in the making with strawberry shortcake and warm gravel scents that gain intensity in the glass. The palate has good weight on the entry with crisp acidity, quite compact at the moment with just a little abrasiveness to address towards the finish. Give this a couple of years in bottle.

The 2013 Chambolle-Musigny 1er Cru les Feusselottes has a well-defined bouquet with raspberry, wild strawberry and overripe orange aromas that gradually unfold in the glass. The palate is medium-bodied with succulent ripe tannins, a dash of white pepper and plenty of vivacious citric fruit on the finish. Very fine.

The 2012 Chambolle-Musigny 1er Cru Les Fuesselots is showing a little more wood on the nose compared to Les Sentiers, but it also shows more intensity. The palate is smooth and rounded on the entry with blackcurrant pastille and raspberry, building nicely towards quite a fleshy finish with plenty of substance. This is a commendable Chambolle for mid-term drinking. One statement nonchalantly uttered by head winemaker Frederic Barnier not only summed up the 2012 vintage, but the plight of Burgundy in recent years. “We have lost around one and a half crops out of the last four.” Imagine losing your equivalent income? For a significant negociant such as Louis Jadot, one that under outgoing(ish) winemaker Jacques Lardiere and his successor, have constantly striven for quality, that dearth of fruit has a major impact. The dramatic decrease in crop means that more people are “fighting” for top quality contracted fruit. The rise in land prices has exacerbated the problem as few can afford to buy vineyards and therefore resort to building small negociant businesses and join the queue. Now, small operations that just require one flagship barrel of grand cru might just be able to afford to pay over the odds. However, a merchant such as Jadot simply cannot afford to do that when they need dozens of barrels to satisfy worldwide demand. So how do they do it? “Relationships,” answers Frederic, “It all comes down to relationships with our contracted growers.” For evidence of that, just flick down to my review of their Bienvenue-Batard-Montrachet that came a whisker away from never being made. So with all the sturm und drang, how are Louis Jadot faring? Suffice to say that Frederic seems to have slipped into Jacques Lardiere’s impossible-to-fill shoes by simply slipping into his own. There was a confidence about him when I conducted two morning sessions with him, though he never crosses the line into braggadocio. The first tasting focused on a complete horizontal of the white. “The (white) 2012s were very rich,” he remarked. “Some of the village crus were overwhelmed and they were too fat and heavy. So in order to maintain freshness we blocked the malo-lactic through sulfur addition.” Frederic goes into more detail of the vintage in the accompanying video, but the main point is that the skins were thick and the berries yielded very little juice. This meant that he had to exact a very prudent vinification in order to eke out the free-run juice without leeching hard, bitter, perhaps astringent elements. He appears to have done exactly that. While I would not say that it was an unmitigated success, after all when you annually produce 100 crus there are bound to be some that don’t quite make the grade, Louis Jadot’s 2012s continue a fine run of form that disprove the theory that large-scale merchants cannot produce wine equal if not better than bijou growers. And that comes from a lot of sweat and tears. Frederic rued that he had not seen his wife or children over the previous four weeks during the harvest! But these prenatal wines appear to have made that temporary estrangement worthwhile. These samples were all taken from barrel and prepared by Frederic Barnier on the same morning of my arrival, with as much effort to reflect the final blend as possible. Note that for the village crus, samples did not include deselected premier crus barrels that will obviously ameliorate those wines. Importer: Kobrand Corp., Purchase, NY; tel. (914) 253-7756 and through Hatch Mansfield in UK.

The 2010 Chambolle-Musigny Les Feusselottes sweeps across the palate with rich, textured dark cherries, flowers, mint and graphite. The fleshy fruit is nicely supported by veins of minerality in this expansive, generous wine. Here, too, the style is quite serious and powerful. The darker side of Chambolle comes through in spades, but there is also plenty of sensuality and grace. In short, this is a marvelous wine endowed with terrific overall balance. Anticipated maturity: 2015-2025. I tasted an amazing range of 2010 reds at Jadot with long-term winemaker Jacques Lardiere and his successor Frederic Barnier. In order to make this large section of the report easier to read, I have broken up the wines into the Cote de Beaune and Cote de Nuits. Lardiere and Barnier told me they were quite worried about the prospects for the harvest upon their return from summer vacations in August, but the year was saved by a perfect September. Yields are down 25-50% because of the frost and cold weather earlier in the year, but overall quality is very high. Lardiere and Barnier also noted that early on it appeared that there would be a wide gap in quality between the Cote de Beaune and the Cote de Nuits, but over time that gap narrowed to some extent. Still, there is little question the vintage was more challenging in the Cote de Beaune because of a rainier summer and overall higher precipitation throughout the year. Importer: Kobrand Corp., Purchase, NY; tel. (914) 253-7756