It was the Grand Jours de Bourgogne last week – so the town was very busy – I don’t think that there were many free hotel rooms as 2,700 people were registered….
Actually, since covid-time, I stopped going to very large tastings with (literally for the GJB) over 1,000 tasters in a room better suited to 2-300, and with so much spitting too 🙂
I anyway prefer to meet one-on-one in a quieter place – the producers’ actual domaine, for instance – and I’m already up to 223 domaines since the (roughly official) launch of my 2024 (vintage) tasting campaign on the 1st October. But the GJB does have a number of tastings outside of the official 2-3 regional tastings per day of the official program – here you can also find interesting things – so I found a couple of those to go to 😉
I also managed to tour around the vines – mainly in the Côte de Beaune last week. Much of the standing-water (in the flats of the vineyards) has receded, so it’s starting to look a little less like 2024, even though I was met with lots of rain on Wednesday !!
Thursday and Friday were sunny days, the views Spring-like, with the flowers blossoming between the vines – the almond blossom is already a memory. You can see that much of the pruning is done, and a large part of laying the bagettes (the main shoot) onto the metal wire is complete. The buds are starting to bulge at the end of the shoots, but I didn’t see any single leaves yet – which hasn’t stopped the caterpillars from starting to eat the buds!
I saw only one vineyard where candles have been deployed in the Côte d’Or – to counter frost – and that was in some villages Santenay, but I hear on the grapevine (literally!) that candles were lit over the weekend in Chablis – maybe some water-sprays too !!
This week, I was in the Mâconnais…
