Midsummer Report

The longest day of the year finds me up in Chablis, tasting the 2021 vintage (more interesting than the well documented difficulties of the growing season would have suggested) and re-tasting the excellent 2020s.

June has been and will continue to be an extremely busy month, spent gathering content for upcoming reports which will be published during the coming months. Those in waiting include:

  • 2012: The Ten Year On Tasting
  • 2002: Twenty Years On
  • Domaine Leflaive: 2020 & 2019 (out now)
  • Further 2020s from the Côte de Nuits
  • Further 2020s from the Côte de Beaune
  • Côte Chalonnaise report
  • Discovering Côte de Nuits Villages
  • Discovering Domaine Pierre-Olivier Garcia
  • Chablis 2021
  • Domaine Ponsot: Dual verticals of Clos de la Roche and Clos des Monts Luisants

During the summer months we will also be beefing up the background information on the various domaines that we cover, as well as on appellations and vineyards.

Recently we sent out a questionnaire to help us understand the strengths and weaknesses of our website. We are mulling over the information we gathered and will putting many aspects into action over the summer. We know we need to work on the speed of the site and will be tweaking various elements of the content. I have thus far resisted putting Drinking Dates against the wines since I think there are so many ways to enjoy Burgundy and different times in the life of a given bottle, and also significant variations in palate preferences which make it difficult to be prescriptive. However, I note the demand for some guidance in this area. Perhaps something along the lines of Best NOT Before might be the way to go!

 

In the vineyards

The 2022 season so far looks promising. There was some frost damage in Chablis and a little elsewhere, but unlike in 2021, this time the reserve buds were undamaged and have helped restore the crop. In any case there was what the locals call a belle sortie, meaning that there were a large number of embryo buds at the outset.

May was hot at times but not throughout the month, and the flowering went off well during a slightly cooler period. Since then conditions have been warm and dry, hot even last week while hail storms have mostly missed the vineyards – there was a little in the Côte Chalonnaise and then two nights ago a small amount in Chablis, on Montée de Tonnerre and Mont de Milieu. We shall of course have to wait and see, but for the moment the vines look healthy – just a bit of oidium pressure from hot days and cooler nights – and we look set for a respectable size of crop and an early harvest. Most people are saying end of August but my bet is that the dates will be very similar to 2020.

 

Fingers Crossed!