Allen Meadow 94
 
This too is quite firmly reduced and about all that can be discerned is a trace of oak toast. The mouth feel of the much finer and less imposingly scaled flavors evidence a lovely minerality on the sappy finish that is both slightly more complex and more persistent. Despite being notably less powerful this is beautifully balanced and should easily repay up to a decade of keeping.
 
Dominique Lafon, only partially tongue-in-cheek, described 2015 as "finally a vintage where we weren't smacked hard by hail! In 2014, I had exactly one vineyard in red and one in white that weren't hit but even so we could see the effects, and particularly so for the pinot vines in 2015, as they just didn't have the vigor that they normally would have. Thankfully we still harvested phenolically ripe and mature fruit but just not much of it. Not surprisingly, the ripeness and the density of the fruit show up in the wines as they are concentrated and serious. The trick in 2015 wasn't to obtain the natural concentration of the fruit but rather to preserve the freshness so that the wines remain inviting." As I reported last year, the domaine is now bottling all its wines with the Diam brand of composite corks using the model known as 30.