At a time when far too many winemakers are talking up the necessity of making their white Burgundy to drink young, what a joy it was to try a range of mature wines from François Jobard, arguably the finest master of Meursault which is designed to age for the long term. Not many white wine verticals go back as far as 2000 – that is where this one started! And the wines just seemed to get better, and even younger, the further back in time we went.

All the bottles were opened shortly before the tasting, for verifying. My original plan was to serve the wines from oldest to youngest, in case the most mature bottles might be fragile. It didn’t take me long to reverse that decision. There was not a lot of difference in colour from start to finish, as it happens, but the older wines had such a sense of structure to them that it seemed they could only grow in stature with a little aeration. I did not regret my choice.

François Jobard started working with his father in the year that I was born, two years before the 5^th Republic was established. I bumped into him, still working in the cellars, though now for his son Antoine, when I visited to taste the 2023s last autumn. François Jobard wines were made with no settling out of the solids, a full two years in barrel, and then bottled with a reasonably heavy dose of sulphur to ensure their longevity at the expense of youthful charm. They could often have a slightly mentholated character which may have been due to a particular fining agent. In those days nobody worried that a wine might be ugly in youth as long as they had confidence about its future development. And here, we found a triumphant justification of the process.

Could it be repeated, starting out today? I suspect not. Antoine Jobard has, not unreasonably, moved away from his father’s methods. His wines are quite different in style, as befits modern requirements. Perhaps more to the point, the more recent vintages from François Jobard, those made in 1992 or later, do not display the same near immortal character of those from the 1970s. I am not aware that he changed anything in technique, but I am sure that riper grapes with lower acidity, now inevitable and already starting by 1990, make such tightly wound white wines with such astonishing longevity a thing of the past.

PS  I have not been dared to put drink dates on these wines. Anything from 1989 and younger should be drunk up, except perhaps the 2000. The wines from the 1970s will still keep if they have been perfectly stored.