This is partly a reminder. \u00a0\u00a0We and others have gone on at length about 2015, particularly with respect to the flattering reds, one of the juiciest and most engaging vintages we can recall.\u00a0 For Burgundy veterans, think back to the expressive, fleshy 2009s, but lighter on their feet like the 2002s, with a nice verve to the acidity that calls 2005 to mind.\u00a0 It will surely be considered in the pantheon of great vintages.<\/p>\n
We have also (and often) discussed the difficulty in finding value in Burgundy a number of times over the years.\u00a0 High demand, small production, not to mention the ups and downs of marginal viticulture in general, have an upward effect on the price tag.\u00a0 Even at the lower end, prices aren\u2019t necessarily all that low.\u00a0 It\u2019s not impossible<\/em> to find a deal.\u00a0 It\u2019s just really hard<\/em>.\u00a0 The best results usually come in concert with the blessing of Mother Nature because Pinot is a delicate grape that needs all the help it can get, a little extra sun raising the level of all vineyards great and small.<\/p>\n Untimely rain, thin skins, under-ripeness, too much heat, not enough heat, there are many things that can cause Pinot to underperform.\u00a0 But the reason that some appellations consistently sell for much higher prices than others is history, plain and simple.\u00a0 Chambertin has hefty price tags because it consistently performs at a high level.\u00a0 The places that don\u2019t carry big tickets do not by virtue of the fact that they don\u2019t perform at the highest level consistently<\/em>.\u00a0 Maybe that lack of consistent success is due to exposure, or perhaps the fact that, year-in and year-out ripeness levels might not be as high as other locations.\u00a0 But it is because they are on the more<\/em> marginal side of \u2018marginal viticulture\u2019 that they sell for less.<\/p>\n However, when the sun shines, those areas perform at their very best.\u00a0 But, because of history, the vignerons can\u2019t charge substantially more money when they are successful because of the \u2018hierarchy\u2019.\u00a0 When that happens, it is the consistent recipe for a deal, and that\u2019s how to play Burgundy in 2015 unless you own oil wells or invented an app.\u00a0 Places like Marsannay, Savigny-Les-Beaune, and Mercurey had sensational seasons in 2015 and we have spent a good amount of time going through the less famous locales to find the honest gems.\u00a0 That we did, though we had to, as they say, \u2018kiss a lot of frogs\u2019 and work through some disappointments to get it done.\u00a0 Hey, that\u2019s Burgundy.<\/p>\n The hardest part isn\u2019t the work, though.\u00a0 The hardest part is bucking the system.\u00a0 When we first referred to the \u2018hierarchy\u2019 in that last paragraph.\u00a0 That is a very specific phenomenon in our view.\u00a0 While there is an \u2018official\u2019 classification to Burgundy that determines Grand Crus and Premier Crus from \u2018village level\u2019 vineyards, there is also an unspoken but immutable pecking order to the vineyards as reported by the press.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to explain even to Burgundy \u2018hardcores\u2019, many of whom accept the hierarchy as law.\u00a0 But if you read enough stuff, you realize that a most of the \u2018conclusions\u2019 are forgone and\/or political.<\/p>\n By \u2018foregone\u2019, we mean that there is a certain \u2018weight\u2019 assigned to certain climats <\/em>and producers.\u00a0 The most brilliant Maranges ever made has an upper limit to its scoring potential because<\/em> it\u2019s Maranges.\u00a0 Most of the time it will dwell in the upper 80s score-wise, perhaps creep into the low 90s on occasion, almost always in cases where that domaine doesn\u2019t have significant upper cuvees in their lineup.\u00a0 But that\u2019s it.\u00a0 If it is tasted in the same cellar next to a wine from a better appellation, the odds of it besting that wine isn\u2019t \u2018zero\u2019.\u00a0 It\u2019s just nearly zero.<\/p>\n Sure there are always exceptions, just not many of them.\u00a0 When a reviewer tastes at a Burgundy domaine, he is presented the wines in the \u2018order of importance\u2019 of the bottlings…Bourgognes et. al, villages wines, Premier Crus and Grand Crus. Reviewers will taste them relative to their pecking order, and the reviews stick to that script a preponderance of the time.\u00a0 Is that the most logical result?\u00a0 Probably, but our point is that it almost never<\/em> varies to the contrary.<\/p>\n On top of that, the 100-point scale that everybody uses these days has an upper limit…100. \u00a0\u00a0A wine cannot score greater than 100, so everything is scaled back from whatever the top effort is.\u00a0 If the best wine in the cellar, using the numbers analogy, scores a 94, the next best has to be less.\u00a0 By the time you get 2-3 wines down the ladder, you are in a place where most consumers are lukewarm about most things, particularly something that has a $50-60 price tag.\u00a0 Those potentially delicious \u2018little wines,\u2019 in these hierarchy lineups, have a remote chance of getting a review that will motivate buyers even though the quality warrants it.<\/p>\n We refer to this as the \u2018theory of relativity\u2019, as in reviewers tend not to always be able to figure out where one group of wines fits in to the broader array of all wines.\u00a0 The best and most extreme illustration is Romaine Conti.\u00a0 Always presented \u2018in order\u2019 (and remember nothing can be scored above 100), by the time you get \u2018down\u2019 to the Echezeaux, you are at 91-92 point scores, the same as a modestly-priced Rioja or Argentine Malbec.\u00a0 Silly.\u00a0 Take that Echezeaux and put it in a different lineup, and it crushes.\u00a0 So what is the takeaway from this small and very slanted sampling?\u00a0 Nothing clear.<\/p>\n Also, from one year to the next, reviewers are either clueless or afraid.\u00a0 Let\u2019s take the 2013 vintage in Burgundy versus the 2015.\u00a0 While the vintages were substantially different qualitatively, the majority of the scores on the individual wines were within a couple of points between the vintages, hardly a reasonable representation of the difference between those two vintages.\u00a0 Also, we don\u2019t recall anyone coming out on the 2013s and saying that these wines weren\u2019t worth the prices and don\u2019t buy them.\u00a0 With 2012 still on shelves,\u00a0and the very good 2014s and flashy 2015s coming down the road, did anyone say not to spend your hard-earned\u00a0dollars on the 2013s.<\/p>\n That would have been honest advice from these reviewers who represent themselves as working for you, the consumer.\u00a0 But we don\u2019t remember seeing anything of the sort in print.\u00a0 We can point to Robert Parker\u2019s brutal honesty with respect to the 1983 red Burgundies a long time ago.\u00a0 He said the reds were overly tannic and had issues with rot.\u00a0\u00a0 Was he right?\u00a0 Doesn\u2019t matter, he was simply giving his honest opinion to the folks that pay him to give them his opinion.\u00a0 The Burgundians didn\u2019t like it very much and, if memory serves, there weren\u2019t many subsequent reviews on Burgundy from Parker.<\/p>\n Are we saying reviewers go easy on the Burgundy producers so they get to come back (and you can infer the same for a lot of top addresses in other areas as well)?\u00a0 Are we suggesting that Burgundy gets treated with \u2018kid gloves\u2019 by the press for fear of reprisal?\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0You can read the pages and pages of predictable reviews and judge for yourself.\u00a0 The same wines finish at the top, the general rankings of the individual wines relative to each other within a portfolio are virtually unvaried year-to-year.\u00a0 Sure there will be the occasional \u2018up and comer\u2019, but the inter-relationship between producers and vineyards is virtually unchanged from house to house and year to year.<\/p>\n Maybe we are jealous.\u00a0 Would we like to get paid to hang out in Burgundy and tell people to buy Dujac and Roumier? Heck yeah! But we have a hard time wondering why anyone would do that.\u00a0 That leaves us, the poor schmuck merchants who are trying give consumers some viable, reasonably priced and enjoyable options thanks to the quirk of fate of an exceptional vintage in a prestige (and typically expensive, sometimes laughably so) region, in a tough place.<\/p>\n There are a lot of delicious wines in Burgundy that won\u2019t break the bank.\u00a0 But the \u2018system\u2019 does not lend itself to promoting them in a meaningful way.\u00a0\u00a0 Human nature being what it is, we certainly can\u2019t expect people to easily shell out say $50-60 for something ( say a village Vosne Romanee) that the \u2018system\u2019 allowed no more than 90-91 points within the \u2018hierarchy\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 Better to spend it on an Oregon Pinot that got a \u201894\u2019, though that score came in a completely different category and mix.<\/p>\n We\u2019re going to continue to do our best because it\u2019s the right thing to do.\u00a0 We love finding that delicious Bourgogne or Marsannay for a song.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0They are out there, particularly in vintages like 2015.\u00a0 Just don\u2019t expect there to be lofty reviews because of the way Burgundy is handled by the media. The hierarchy of vineyard and producer, the top-heavy score bias, and the \u2018old boy\u2019 review network, make us feel like salmon swimming against the very predictable current in the sense of creating sales.\u00a0 You \u00a0will get sweeping (though calculated) comments regarding a vintage overall.\u00a0 But when you actually dig into the individual reviews, the information is predictable and not particularly enlightening.<\/p>\n Still, we have found things that we are truly exciting from this vintage because they are compelling, engaging bottles of Pinot Noir to drink (or hold) from the place where Pinot was born.\u00a0 That is ultimately the point.\u00a0 Given all of the things we have mentioned, you can clearly understand that there are a lot easier things for us to sell than Burgundy.\u00a0 \u00a0But finding a $20-30 Monthelie that you can pull out in a few years that puts a smile on your face is a labor of love.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is partly a reminder. \u00a0\u00a0We and others have gone on at length about 2015, particularly with respect to the flattering reds, one of the juiciest and most engaging vintages we can recall.\u00a0 For Burgundy veterans, think back to the expressive, fleshy 2009s, but lighter on their feet like the 2002s, with a nice verve … Continue reading “THE 2015 VINTAGE IN BURGUNDY\u00a0REVISITED”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2314,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18,39],"tags":[161,64],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2285"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2287,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2285\/revisions\/2287"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winex.com\/stockreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}