A new report – 2022 Part 3 – Reds from mainly the Côte de Beaune producers!

By billn on January 10, 2024 #reports

June 2022 - VolnayPart 3 – 2022 Reds (part 1) HERE !!

This issue with my vintage summary – 2022 whites and reds together

This is the third of my series focusing on the 2022 vintage and it contains 30 mainly red wine domaines from the Côte de Beaune and a few from the Chalonnaise.

That’s 96(!) domaines published since the harvest not forgetting another 20 domaines 2022s tasted before the harvest. Another 60-or-so domaines from the Côte de Nuits will be published in 7-10 days. So that’s 170 domaines’ 2022s tasted before I start the tour of 100 domaines in Chablis next week 🙂

RSV – what a difference a little patience makes…

By billn on January 05, 2024 #degustation

Okay, in this instance nearly 25 years of patience for this, the last of the ‘cheap St.Vivants!’

Okay, cheap is certainly relative; this 1999 vintage still cost 80 Swiss Francs a bottle on release – about £40 a bottle at the prevailing exchange rate – I bought a whole case – remember 12-bottle cases? That price was the same as Engel’s Grand Echézeaux and Leroy’s Domaine Savigny 1er Les Narbantons – I bought those on release too, but that latter wine was finished 2 years ago…

This parcel was sold to Wilf Jaeger in 2005 who passed it on via a fermage agreement to Dujac to make the wine. I later heard from more than one source that all was not well between the two parties, so it’s no surprise that Dujac never show the wine – I hope that things are now on a more even keel. I don’t know the current status of this parcel between the parties…

Thomas-Moillard (and sometimes later labelled Domaine Charles Thomas) used ‘rotary fermenters’ during this period – ultra extraction – so it was hardly a surprise when they made hard wines – more of a surprise was that the 1998 and 2000 of this wine were so delicious and at a young age too – maybe they felt that they had to extract more in what they thought was a good vintage!

And, right from the start, what a wine this was – hard as nails! It was still impenetrable at 20 years old so I’m mildly shocked by how it’s now showing!

1999 Thomas-Moillard, Romanée St.Vivant
Lots of colour. A little alcoholic and still with a slug of creamy, almost resinous, aromatic oak – but also a hint of floral perfume too – and that’s new. Mouth-filling, silky, with a certain richness to the texture and depth of flavour – where has this fine texture come from? And come to that, where has the hard personality and tannin gone? It’s still a baby due to the overt concentration and still lacking a little grace, but a wine of (now!) obvious potential. Probably still not ‘ready’ for at least 5 more years but I’ll take today’s ‘drinkable.’ In fact, I’m quite enjoying it, even the second glass (shock) – there’s more than a decent chance for the remaining 4 or 5 bottles…
Rebuy – Maybe

Happy New Year…

By billn on January 04, 2024 #reports#site updates

… and the ones that got away!

There’s no other time like December/January for the Burgundy Report – so little (apparently) happening but so much typing 🙂

I’ve so far uploaded the first two reports for the 2022 vintage – the whites of the Côte de Beaune and the Mâconnais – and I’m well on my way with the Côte de Beaune reds (online Monday or Tuesday) with the Côte de Nuits to follow maybe 1 week later. 66 new reports are already online with 80-90 more on their way.

I’ve not included any vintage summary – yet – it will appear in the next report. For a special reason this year, I will combine the whites and reds into a single summary – all will be clear when you read it !!

And the ones that got away?

Well, that would be practically all my planned Christmas and New Year bottles. Every year, just before Christmas we spend some days in Nice – me typing in the mornings and in the afternoon we promenade! This year the weather was lovely – sunny and 14-16°C. For our return trip we decided to spend 2-3 days in Beaune – but already the first evening my better half wasn’t feeling well. The next day she was worse, so we headed directly to Bern. She had a strong flu (twice negative for corona) – and guess what? Three days later, me too – despite both of us having taken flu jabs.

My better half is just about well now, I still have a dumb cough so haven’t jogged for 12 days already. We have managed to finish a bottle of cremant over the last 3 days – which is a clear improvement! – but couldn’t finish the couple of bottles of Beaujolais that I opened over the last 10 days. But one was a useful exercise; I caught my first (known!) dose of corona in September and whilst I quickly regained my tasting faculties, I wasn’t sure that I could smell and taste the pyrazines as effectively as before. With the Lapierre 2021 I know that the sensations of the pyrazines is well and truly back 🙂 Oh well – the rest of the wines should last another year 😉

Health and happiness to you all in 2024 !!

A new report – 2022 whites Part 2 !

By billn on December 31, 2023 #reports

Viré-Clessé 2022Part 2 – the last day of the year! HERE !!

This is the second of my series focusing on the 2022 vintage and it contains 29 mainly white wine domaines from the Mâconnais – with a few gamays included for good measure. In 7 or 8 days will come the first (of two) red issues and this will include my vintage summary.

66 Domaines published, another 90-or-so are on their way 🙂

Wishing you all the best for your year-end celebrations !!

A new report – 2022 whites !

By billn on December 24, 2023 #reports

2022 MeursaultOnline before my Christmas lunch! HERE !!

It’s the first of my series focusing on the 2022 vintage and it contains 37 mainly white wine domaines from the Côte d’Or. I’ll follow that – before the end of 2023 with the whites of the Mâconnais – another 30-or-so domaines – and in this ‘October’ report I’ll also include an overview of the vintage.

The reds will follow, starting with the Côte de Beaune and following on with the Côte de Nuits – hopefully, all online by the 15th of January – because that’s when I’ll be starting my tour of Chablis 2022!

Wishing you all the best for your year-end celebrations !!

Beaune is 820 years old

By billn on December 17, 2023 #anniversaries

In 1203, under the reign of Philip, King of the Franks, Beaune was founded, and for the first time ‘chartered’ to be represented by a Mayor.

The full text can be found – translated from Latin into French – here. And, of course you should follow the Municipal Archives of Beaune if you enjoy history like this !!

From the Municipal Archives you can see here how little there was in Beaune in the 1200s !

Saint Vincent !!

By billn on December 16, 2023 #events

It’s that time again – almost!

La Saint-Vincente Tournante 2024
This time hosted by Chambolle-Musigny & Morey St.Denis – this will be the 80th edition of this event.

If you enjoy a walk in the cold and rain (typically) but with a glass in your (shivering!) hand and the smell of thousands of garlic-snails – then this is for you.

Set your agenda for the 27th and 28th January 2024. The last time the ‘Tournante’ was held in CHambolle-Musigny was in 1979 – for Morey St.Denis they’ve had to wait since 1973 !!

They have a particularly good website this year too: www.saintvincent2024.fr

A new report is online…

By billn on December 14, 2023 #reports

Chablis July-2023
Chablis July-2023
I’m now starting to to get a grip on the wave (avalanche?!) of new domaine reports – there’s only another 150, which translates to 75-100 hours of work – over the holiday period 😉

See here – with lots of new names visited.

The next big report will be that of 2022 White burgundy – hopefully online before the end of the month.

Wishing you all well!!

The great burgundy firesale…

By billn on December 11, 2023 #the market

In some places it’s already happened but be prepared for the wider ripple !!

I’ve been expecting it to happen, and it now seems that there’s a chain of events underway that will be difficult to halt, or maybe even to slow down.

Burgundy Wine MarketFor a while now the price of burgundy wines has been so resilient that you would rightly wonder what might be required – in a geopolitical sense – to apply the brakes to this runaway pricing train.

The region like to point out that the average price for their wine is quite low; after I published their most recent key figures, Vice-President of the BIVB, François Labet commented “This is a real blow to those who constantly say that Burgundy is too expensive. More than 70% of Burgundy’s production includes wines costing less than €10 (in French supermarkets). It is true however that a good 10% is more expensive….. but it is a very small part of the whole production.

But life is more complicated than this view – as phrased.

I will not use the names of the traders or producers that have provided the following info, as we have no beef with anyone who tells it like it is – but maybe their colleagues might prefer that this stays, for the longest time, under wraps:

The high-value secondary market
A merchant who has business in this market confides, for a large part of this year the secondary market for ‘high-end’ wines has taken a tumble, there was no immunity even for the blue-chip producers – for instance, Rousseau and DRC – their wines are still selling and are still seen as ‘safe bets‘ but their actual sales prices have been trading at a discount of 30-40% of ‘sticker-prices.’

If that’s the case for blue-chips, what about the much talked about new names? I could use Bizot or Lachaux as examples – an auction contact in ‘Asia’ tells me that those wines are currently unsellable – at least, not with the reserve prices wished by the sellers – and that’s largely because those sellers already bought high!

In the current context of the fine wine market, you can look at it like any other investment; if you bought at release pricing, or invested a few years ago, you can still be very happy with the resale value of your wines – if that’s an important consideration for you. If you bought at or near the peak of pricing – ie in the last 1-2 years and need to convert that investment to hard cash, I believe the appropriate metaphor is – you will be taking a bath!

Outwardly, this is not visible if you scan the price lists of the major sellers of traded fine wine, and that’s because, ‘If we were to update our spreadsheets with the actual prices that have been traded in the last 3-6 months, we may have to write down our whole trading book by close to 50% – which will, of course, affect the valuations of our stocks and so our company too! Currently, our worst nightmare would be a client who came to us needing to urgently ‘liquify’ a large parcel of named wines – they certainly wouldn’t achieve half of what our pricelists indicate – assuming we can even find buyers!

As another contact puts it ‘The people with the money and the interest in these wines still have both but they can smell the blood in the water and seem pretty confident that they will be able to buy all these same wines in the very near future for a much smaller price than today!

Anyone who has listed some of their cellar with traders in the last year will recognise the paucity of transactions…

New wine coming onto the market
I have, for probably too long, been suggesting that a pricing correction is inevitable. I still think there is the possibility of even higher pricing for some sectors of the market where rarity is an important factor – but we have to talk about the bulk of burgundy wine – the 70% that is regional and villages wine.

We, and the region, are more than happy to have seen the delivery of two vintages with volume – 2022 & 2023. To the largest extent, neither of those two vintages are on the market yet but the January – sometimes December – ‘en primeur’ offers (of UK merchants) for the 2022s will be winging their way to your inboxes very soon.

2021 pricing jumped (again!) due to frost and a very low volume. 2022 has returned to a normal volume. So 2022 can be cheaper? Nope!

Whilst some domaines have indicated to me that they will not increase their 2022 prices – or may even reduce them a little – the vast majority of François Labet’s ‘70%’ will be based on the bulk pricing of wine: 2021 was a small volume vintage that followed 2 other small volume vintages (2019 & 2020) so the bulk wine of 2022 came onto the bulk market in the context of almost no stock – so increased in price again as people fought to have something to sell. But there is pushback:

  • Look at the new strategy of Artemis – owners of Château Latour and now Clos de Tart, Eugenie and Bouchard Père et fils; 80% of Bouchard’s production was a handful of, non-domaine, regional cuvées. In 2023 they refocus only on domaine wines – so the equivalent of millions of bottles of ‘Bourgogne’ have been released back into the bulk market – ie there is less bulk demand at the same time that there is more available wine.
  • Other large Beaune ‘maisons’ tell me that they have significantly cut their 2023 purchases on the bulk market, citing that they won’t be able to sell those wines at a profit.
  • Even exporters from the region are telling me that they are very pessimistic for the 2022 campaign to come ‘At village and regional level I haven’t been able to sell wine for 6 months but at the same time, some of our producers are preparing price increases for 2022!
  • One step closer to the consumer a UK importer told me that a well-known producer in the Côte de Beaune made a cuvée of Pouilly-Fuissé for them. In 2021 the price went up 25% – and the merchant understood and accepted – you can’t escape the frost and hail! When they came to talk about 2022 the producer was asking for an additional 30% – so the importer simply walked away.

Did I say that there was no stock? I should have been more precise – low stock in Burgundy.

Despite such a low volume vintage, you can still find plenty of 2021 on store shelves and from merchants in your region. This is an issue with the route to market for wine; the producers may successfully sell all their 2022 wine to agents/intermediaries and cavistes and assume that all is well – but if those wines don’t sell to the end-customers, those same agents/intermediaries and cavistes won’t be nearly so ready to buy any 2023s – so the producers have some period of insulation from the true market.

Here I can make parallels with Bordeaux: When I first moved to Switzerland in 2000, the wineshops were full of the 1997s – a modest yet more expensive vintage than the better received 1996s. The Bordelaise twisted the arms of their customers with the threat that there would be no allocations of the vintage with the magic number ie ‘2000’ if they didn’t also buy plenty of 1997. It was 5-6 years that those wines clogged up the Swiss supply chain – unloved and unsold – before we suddenly saw 50% discounts to move the seemingly unending stocks. Bordeaux soon became the watchword for expensive wine and lost much custom because if it – it was a reputation earned.

Reputations ‘Earned’
Today, the majority of Bordeaux is not that expensive – at least compared with the current pricing expectations of the Burgundians – but 20 years later, their reputation as ‘expensive’ endures – it was a reputation earned. You can also look at what bad Beaujolais Nouveau did to the market for Beaujolais’ best wines – another reputation earned. Is it too late for Burgundy to shake off the reputation for expensive? – have they earned that reputation? If they have, it will also hang around their necks for a generation…

Burgundy Report

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