Welcome to the first issue of the Burgundy Report (BR). The aim of this regular report is to both to steer you towards, and to profile interesting domains; people who have a passion for their produce. BR will also aim to give background information about the appellations, or if you prefer, the different vineyard areas. It is worth mentioning that BR is a non-commercial site. It asks for no subscriptions and receives no financial reward from any of the domains that are profiled. Just focus!

Although lots of wine will be drunk along the way (hopefully with food as this is its intended purpose), BR should not be your main source for wine appraisal notes. Tasters such as Clive Coates, Allen Meadows, Stephen Tanzer or Per-Henrik Mansson are the (English Language) tasters in print with the knowledge and consistency of palate that you require, and of-course they can offer a breadth of individual tasting notes that you will not find here. Whilst we are talking about tasting wine, this is a good time to introduce the topic of scoring wines; as far as BR is concerned, describing wine should be just that, it is the words that are important. So you will not generally find wines scored with bunches of grapes or as 17.5/20, 22/25 or indeed 92/100. I say “not generally” because from time-to-time we may have guest contributors who like to work in that way – and of course this might be how you prefer things!

There are many good sources of information about the Burgundy region and it’s wines and hopefully BR will become another of your trusted sources. But always remember one thing: despite the many vintage and wine reports of ‘trusted palates’ there is really only one palate that counts – and that is your own.