Jadot’s 2007 Beaune Greves Le Clos Blanc smells of almond, pear, and apple; offers an engagingly juicy palate impression, tinged with chalk, but free of the austerity I anticipated in this site from 2007; and finishes with subtly wafting lily perfume adding to the appeal of ripe orchard fruits and the profundity of chalk. (That profundity appears to be indirectly proportional to the depth of subsoil in this vineyard before one hits mother rock!). I expect this dense yet subtly creamy, elegant, and refreshing Chardonnay – with its excellent tack record – will gain in complexity over the next several years and keep well for at least the better part of a decade. Jadot is one of those addresses where I confess to having feared that the combination of this vintage’s marked impression of acidity and relative leanness with Jacques Lardiere’s love of precision and merely selective use of malo-lactic fermentation might result in a dearth of sensual appeal. And he is the first to admit that a relatively high proportion of malic acidity was present in 2007, along with a danger of vegetal notes. But Lardiere took most of his 2007s all the way through malo, and my fears were at worst marginally realized. An overarching caveat is that these wines received higher dosages of sulphur (25 versus 15 grams) at bottling than those of other recent vintages, and will – Lardiere opines – take longer to shake off a certain pungency or hardening, but it did not find that alarming. As usual, I could not take time to taste all of Jadot’s many bottlings, which are less numerous this year, in any case, than in 2006. Incidentally, the first vintages of Domaine Ferret Pouilly-Fuisse under Jadot’s ownership and Lardiere’s direction – on which I shall report at a later time – are tremendously successful, preserving and even elevating critical elements of the personality that has long wines from that estate so memorable. Importer: Kobrand, Inc., New York, NY; tel.(212) 490 9300