For info, this year the Vougeraie harvest log is online – help yourself.

So yesterday evening was leftovers and two grand crus, both from Camille Giroud; a 2007 Corton-Charlemagne and 2008 Charmes-Chambertin – both very good indeed as somebody might say, actually the Charlemagne could have been fine-plus!

I mentioned yesterday the potential this year for a Côte de Beaune, Côte de Nuits divide, so lets get into that: It hangs on maturity and the weather. Much of the Côte de Beaune will have been harvested (we’re talking reds) by Monday and at decent maturity too. There is some rot, but few of the best sites have been significantly affected – grape quality was rather good, 2006++. Despite also having excellently clean grapes (still) the Côte de Nuits has an issue – in general the grapes are not yet ready to pick. 11-12° is still common. While we had blue skies and sunshine the cold temperatures were not too much of a problem – photosynthesis continues. Now we have cloudy skies, (even) cooler temperatures and more rain in the forecast, 5° or lower overnight. I expect a sudden rush into any vineyard that reaches 12.5°, maybe even a bit less! The forecast says it may turn warmer and sunny Tuesday or Wednesday – but the forecast has a poor record this year. Côte de Nuits producers will be hoping the forecasters have got something right…

Today the pickers are out at first light, just about 7:30 – there was a little rain overnight, but we have dry, fairly bright, if cloudy skies. Onwards with Pommard Clos des Vergers – this is a villages plot but the grapes are frankly excellent – hardly any triage is required, lovely stuff. You tend to be quite concentrated whilst triaging, so it was a surprise mid-morning when I looked around to see that there was some heavy rain. It lasted about 20-30 minutes, before we moved back to cloudy with sunny spells. After the Pommard, Santenay 1er La Comme. These grapes needed a bit more care to weed out unripe binches (bunches that really shouldn’t have been picked) and a little rot – a good result though, in the end I think we triaged well over 4 tonnes of Pommard/Santenay grapes before lunch.

Did somebody mention lunch? It was a simple affair of melon and Parma ham, veal with potato (Dauphinoise of-course), cheese (including probably too much Brillat-Savarin) and pineapple upside-down. Wine was a Giroud 2000 Hautes Côtes Blanc followed by Louis-Michel Liger-Belair’s first vintage of Echézeaux, the 2006. It remains the best Echézeaux I ever tasted from barrel though I was surprised how oaky this wine was, but aromatically it was a powder-keg of complexity, it needs much more time though.

Our afternoon will not be as packed as first planned because the pickers were told to stand down after the morning rain. Still, there’s plenty of villages Volnay this afternoon from a different contract to yesterday’s Volnay. The grapes are excellent, only some unripe bunches to pull out and some with verjus – tiny ungrown green berries amongst the ripe ones – to remove. So we have an early finish, we can start the clean-up already at 6pm…

So the night before and I open a bottle of Blair Pethel’s Domaine Dublère 2007 Beaune 1er Blanche Fleurs and watched James Bond on TV! The wine is really on-song, even the domestic management is appreciative – though I think a lot of the depth of flavour seems barrel-related (creamy vanilla dimensions), it has great texture, is slightly plush and generally shows lovely balance.

Okay, that was yesterday – now I’m in Beaune, and just in time.

Typically it started raining at home 3 minutes before I wanted to pack things into the car (…) most of the trip to Burgundy was dry though. Arriving to the car-park at the hotel it started with a little light rain. Five minutes after I got to the domaine, the heavens opened – big rain, glad I’m not picking!

Fortunately today’s grapes had been picked before the wet. We started triage of Volnay 1er Lurets, and really good these grapes were; full speed on the triage table and virtually zero rot – they tasted good too. The Lurets is part of a new contract together with Volnay Caillerets, but the usual give and take means that to take these 1ers, there’s also some villages Volnay to be taken too. We had been prepared for bad grapes but apart from a little rot and some underipe bunches to be triaged – I saw much worse grapes in 2006 – we still had the table running at about 90% of maximum speed !

This afternoon it was only be a delivery of Bourgogne Blanc must so no triage. If the rain abates, tomorrow will be busy though.

Info on whites seems to be all related to the storm on the Sunday 12th September. Two days before the storm the home team’s Meursault looked fantastic – the vigneron had done a great job, leaving neatly spaced bunches – everything was set. Whether they were hit by hail or not (hail was restricted to the Santenay/Chassagne border), many vines seemed to react to that weather; Those plots with the most advanced maturity were suddenly beset by botrytis – 20% of the previously beautiful Meursault was affected 1 week later. There were many stories in the last days of winemakers harvesting because their grapes were ‘turning brown’ or ‘turning to chocolate’ – that was the botrytis. Those plots with a lower level of ripeness (at the storm) seem to have followed a normal maturity path and largely failed to develop botrytis! Apparently everyone was harvesting Montrachet yesterday – the last minute before today’s rain.

Having done a good job of triage the home team were rewarded with cheese and tomato tart, duck a l’orange, cheese and finally apple tart tartin. A 2007 Montagny 1er blanc from Christophe Denizot and a 99 Fourrier Gevrey VV helped to wash it down. So effective was this lunch that there were parts of blue sky to be seen by 1:30, in fact the sun shone on-and-off all afternoon, more importantly it stayed dry. Parts of the Côtes had as much as 30mm in the morning!

Tomorrow more on the Côte de Beaune, Côte de Nuits divide…

Okay – the first full report will be tomorrow as I interrogate my fellow harvesters and stageurs – but it looks like I will be doing it wearing several layers of (waterproof!) clothing.

The forecast for my weekend – how about yours(?)

Plenty of producers in the Côte de Beaune have started to harvest their first parcels today. Fewer in the Côte de Nuits have ventured out, most of those look like they have another 3 or 4 days left to sharpen their secateurs.

My timing to join the home team looks not too bad – shame that the long-term forecast means rain might great me on Friday – that said, the long-range forecast has been wrong all year! On a positive note I feel sure that lots of producers will point to the fact that they need light as much as heat to ripen their grapes – in that respect the last days and those to come look like they might help them to generate some positive ‘spin’!

Things are very busy at Vincent Girardin’s base in Meursault; not only are they about to start harvesting, they’ve also bought a new domaine.

First the harvesting; it’s starting for Vincent Girardin with some chardonnay in the Côte de Beaune, some others are already brining in the first grapes. The storm on Sunday that delivered hail to northern Santenay and parts of Chassagne (‘just’ Morgeot mainly) mainly left a lot of fruit needing to picked sooner rather than later. The rest of the domaine’s vines will be harvested between next week and the end of the month.

Another grower confirms this, telling me:

There’s rot and it’s ok with the cold weather but there’s great heterogeneity. Anyway in general everyone is planning to pick earlier than they had first expected so harvest will probably be over by Oct 1st

Let’s see…

Now back to the enlarged Domaine Vincent Girardin – actually the new part is still a separate entity because it’s in Beaujolais – but there are 20 new hectares of vines from the estate La Tour du Bief in Chénas:

All parcels of the twenty hectares of the estate La Tour du Bief are in the village of Chénas with “lieux-dits” Les Caves, La Rochelle, Les Vérillats, Le Bief and La Tour du Bief.
A rigorous, impeccable farming plan allowed us to find an exceptional genetic reserve, with some of the vines being more than 80 years old. What more can be expected when the ambition is to restore life to this estate by producing exceptional wines?
Today, my goal is to continue the tradition of the production of great Moulin-à-Vent wines that, in the last century, competed with the great villages of the Côte de Nuits. With their structure and complexity linked to a potentially important capacity for ageing, wines from Moulin-à-Vent were always cited as examples and with age, it’s said that they “Pinotent”, meaning getting closer to their Burgundian (Pinot) neighbors by evoking aromas of cherry, matured fruits, spices and truffle.
A project of classification of the best soils as “Premier Crus” as in Burgundy is about to be studied to return this great wine to nobility. The parcels of the estate will be affected by this classification.
Winemaking is traditional, followed by ageing partly in wood foudres of 50hl and then in Burgundian barrels of 228 liters. Wines are neither fined nor filtered in order to give them as much complexity and life as is natural.
(Vincent’s press release.)

“It’s a bit early to say much about the vintage, but I get the feeling we’re heading for another mixed-bag of a year, perhaps like 2006 or 2008. The best vineyards look perfect (as they do every year – plague, pestilence and hail permitting), while the worst are beginning to look a bit sad with some rot, mildew and uneven ripening. That said, on average, I think there is currently less rot and mildew than recent ‘challenging’ vintages (04,06,07,08).
The soil was damp for much of August so perhaps 2010 is unlikely to be the last word in concentration. I haven’t heard anyone else make the comparison, but it reminds me a bit of 2006 with a hot June/July, disappointing August and then (hopefully!!) a pleasant September.
The weather is currently perfect (low 20s, breezy and sunny) and forecast to remain so until next week which looks stormy and wet. Obviously the weather we get next week and beyond could have a major influence on the style of the vintage”.

Time to take stock as the producers contemplate their August holidays – and without need to rush home early this year!

The long range weather forecast was for a mild winter, so we promptly enjoyed the coldest and longest for a very long time. One night around the 21st December, and depending on your place in the Côtes, the temperature at midnight plumbed -17 to -19°C. Typically this is no big problem for vines, unfortunately it was quite early into the winter season, and more importantly the temperature at 6pm the same day was a mere 0°C. Small pockets of low-lying vines, mainly in the Vosne and Morey area were engulfed in a fatal frost, occasional individual vines, perhaps weakened by disease, also succumbed. These were the first losses to frost since about 1985, the largest area I saw in April was in the low-lying lieu-dit of Beaune Les Mariages yet the vines to the side were untouched – maybe the soil had not been piled against the feet of the vines or perhaps it was as simple as keeping grass between the rows but one vigneron lost everything, the neighbour nothing. You can see below a picture taken last week of the already grubbed up plot of Les Mariages.

Re the frosts, BIVB chose to released a statement:

WINTER FROSTS IN BURGUNDY
Vine stocks still without leaves in June… this has been the unpleasant surprise this spring: significant vine loss has been observed following the winter frosts. Exceptionally low temperatures were recorded on 20 December, approaching -20C°. These extreme temperatures affected vine stocks all the more because of their sudden arrival, after a long period of relatively mild weather up to mid-December.
The vines thus affected did not continue their cycle. In Côte de Nuits, more badly affected than Côte de Beaune, the bottoms of the slopes were particularly hit, with quite significant losses in some cases, as in Vosne-Romanée and Morey-St-Denis. Vines were also affected in Clos de Vougeot. Most of the vineyards in Côte de Nuits were damaged, to a greater or lesser degree. “When the frost came, I think the sap had not yet fully descended, which made the vines particularly vulnerable to this sudden change in temperature”, explains one Vosne-Romanée winegrower. We have to go back to 1985 to find a similar situation. Quite severe frost damage was also observed in Mâconnais and, to a lesser extent, in Côte Chalonnaise. The areas which seem to be worst affected are situated between Igé and Chardonnay, and some damage has also been reported in Givry. Plots in the Yonne were less affected, although some fairly random damage has been noted at the low valley plots in Le Chablisien. It is difficult to draw up final statistics in terms of surface area, since growth has recommenced on a few plants which appeared to be dead. The flow of sap needs to be allowed to resume naturally. Late budding of branches is still possible.

The cold winter put everything behind the average schedule, but a warm early April brought this closer to average with budbreak before the end of that month. May was miserable and cold so some of the time that had been ‘gained’ was again ‘lost’. Flowering started in the middle of June for a week to 10 days depending on the place and altitude in the Côtes – the Hautes Côtes up to 2 weeks later. There was rain during flowering, not enough to wash things away but enough to make it (the flowering) not completely homogenous. Actually the ‘fruit-set’ looks almost good – another vintage with plenty of millerandes or small grapes.

As of the 31st July the vineyards have had their summer trim and look very smart in the sunshine. Forecasters are proposing a hot August though it’s started cool and wet – hmm those will be the same forecasters that proposed a mild winter I suppose – anyway, with (forecast) warm weather, harvesting could start as early as mid September, I’m betting it will be a week or two later – but let’s see. What we have today looks excellent, but we have another 6-9 weeks to get through – and it is rarely benign!

For those that are interested, there has been an earlier, and still ongoing commantary here.