2018 Vincent Girardin Meursault Les Narvaux, Cote de Beaune

Always bottled later than the other lieux-dits, the 2018 Meursault Les Narvaux has turned out brilliantly, unwinding in the glass with notes of crisp yellow orchard fruit, Anjou pear, citrus zest, almond paste and fresh bread. Medium to full-bodied, satiny and layered, it's concentrated and incisive, with a racy spine of acidity, a tightly wound core and a long, mineral finish. This is worth a special effort to seek out.

92 points William Kelley robertparker.com

Reputations, once formed, are hard to shake, and one of my recurring professional challenges is to attempt to change them. Times passes, personnel move on, and approaches evolve; but stereotypes persist. So all I can do is repeat that the wines produced under the Vincent Girardin label today are superb and that I'm happy to have some in my own cellar. Readers will remember the history: Vincent Girardin debuted as a winemaker in 1982, creating his négociant maison in 1990 with his family domaine holdings at its core, distinguished by insisting on purchasing grapes as opposed to must or finished wines. When Girardin's expanding holdings became too much to handle, Eric Germain—brother of Jean-François Germain, who presides over Meursault reference-point Domaine Henri Germain—was brought in to supervise winemaking in 2002. Germain, as he puts it, harbored the ambition "to make not merely good wine but instead great wine," and also wines that could age. He presided over a wholesale change in winemaking practices that has continued to progress since the maison's purchase by the Compagnie des Vins d’Autrefois in 2011. Wines that were once oaky and somewhat exaggerated are now taut, incisive and beautifully differentiated by site. There's much more attention to detail in the vineyards—fully 21 hectares of which are now owned—and they are increasingly being converted to biodynamic farming. Élevage is longer. And Germain uses much less new oak and little bâtonnage. So, this is now a very serious source for high-quality white Burgundy, and the reflex to dismiss this producer as "commercial" is entirely misplaced. While the fact that Germain enjoyed considerable success in 2017 is almost to be expected, the true measure of the quality of what is being done here is the success of the 2018s: seamless, structured and complete, they display all of the year's merits and none of its weaknesses. Everything reviewed here therefore comes warmly recommended.