Burgundy Hails a Great 2019 Vintage

The French don’t really have a word for “hype”, but they are pretty good at it, when they want to be.

The enthusiasm we’re seeing currently with the release of the 2019 Burgundies is subdued by the lack of actual tastings, so perhaps it doesn’t quite qualify as hype. But when you get grower after grower asserting that they’ve never seen anything so good in their lifetimes, you begin to wonder.

The wines I’ve tasted (not as many as usual, to be sure) do suggest that 2019 is pretty special. It has the ripeness and lushness of a hot year, but with the acidity and poise of a cooler one. Tannins are firm but silky, and alcohol, that bugbear of hot years, is not very high. Miraculously, it seems to tick all the boxes. All but one, anyway – there’s not a lot of it. Yields are, on average, about 25 percent down on 2018.

It’s traditional, at this point, to have a look at the weather that produced these wines, so let’s do just that. The 2018 vintage was relatively plentiful, and plentiful vintages tend to be followed by smaller ones anyway as the vines adjust their working patterns. The winter was dry, and there were five late frosts which hit the buds. Chassagne-Montrachet, Saint-Aubin, the lower slopes of Puligny-Montrachet and Marsannay, all get mentioned in every discussion of frost. And Chablis, as ever. Caroline Lestimé of Jean-Noël Gagnard reckons she lost about 20 percent of her crop to frost, and then lost some more to coulure and millerandage because flowering was late and uneven. After that there were heat spikes and drought in June and July, so there wasn’t much juice in the grapes, and the skins were thick. August was cooler, with a little rain and even storms, but these were very local; picking was not as early as in 2018 or indeed 2020.

A vintage of contrasts

It’s not an even vintage: some growers have coped better than others with the conditions, and more clayey vineyards often kept their freshness better. Guillaume Lavollée of Génot-Boulanger contrasts the clay of Puligny’s Folatières site with the limestone of Garennes, which “becomes like an oven”. Each site’s particularities were emphasized this year: Guillaume points to his Pommard Clos Blanc plot, which has an underground stream running beneath it: “This plot always takes advantage in hot years.” In Vosne-Romanée, Matilde Grivot points to Pruliers as very good this year; plenty of clay in the soil makes for powerful wines, but there’s delicacy too. “Perfect for winter dinners,” she says.

Grivot is known for powerful, ripe wines – “we’re very focused on the maturity of the skins”, she says – and in 2019 didn’t start picking until September 18. Matilde’s father Etienne says he has never seen such perfect maturity with such perfect acidity, but the date of picking was key. Those thick skins meant that tannin ripeness was essential, so people had to wait; but ripening was very fast at the end, and alcohol could rise rapidly, making harvest date an especially ticklish decision.

For Edouard and Arthur Clair of Domaine Bruno Clair, the challenge of the year was keeping freshness. They’re fond of whole-bunch fermentation, and used about 30-50 percent in 2019: you can compensate for low pH this way, they say. True, whole-bunch fermentation can increase the pH a bit more, but you get more sensation of freshness in the mouth. Nevertheless, they reckon that 50 percent is enough, even in a ripe year, because if you overdo it you can mask the terroir.

It was a year that suited whole-bunch fermentation, and there was a lot of it about – but not everywhere. Matilde, at Grivot, favours destemming and putting whole berries into the vat. “”We never want whole-bunch for our wines,” she says. Whole berries give more fruitiness, she says, and more delicate tannins.

Either way, the acidity is good, and higher than in 2018, which seems odd, when it was certainly hot. But the periods of heat were interspersed by cooler periods, and nights were fairly cool. In 2018, by contrast, the heat was unrelenting. Also, that millerandage, which might have made growers roll their eyes in the early summer, proved a blessing: the tiny berries in the bunches had plenty of acidity. Levels of tartaric acid remained high, and were concentrated along with everything else. It might even be that millerandage is the key to the whole vintage.

A light touch

This was not a year in which producers seem to have extracted too much in the cellar; it was a year for a light touch. Will Hargrove of UK merchant Corney & Barrow reckons that ten  to 15 years ago wines like these would have had too much new oak thrown at them for too long – a belt-and-braces approach that we no longer see in Burgundy.  Nowadays it’s all about less oak, older oak, larger barrels, and concrete, too, which adds up to more delicacy, and wines that are drinkable earlier. My impression of the reds is of concentration without too much fleshy opulence – I say “too much” because if that’s what you want you don’t have to go to Burgundy to get it. There is more tension than I expected, sweet, dark fruit, and lovely aromas. They’re approachable young, but they have the balance and the structure to age.  Caroline Lestimé describes them as “fresh, but with bones”.

The whites, too, have tension. They’re less even in quality than the reds, and some growers in Chablis were caught out by frost. Where do they sit on the ripeness scale? Very ripe years in Burgundy tend to be more Chardonnay than Burgundy in style, whereas “classic” years are more Burgundy than Chardonnay. Most 2019 whites are somewhere in the middle, veering towards greater ripeness: there can be a yellow-fruit – even honeyed – character, which might not please classicists, but is nevertheless delicious.

Burgundy has come a long way from the shockingly hot 2003 vintage, the first of the really hot years, which was chunky and four-square at this stage. Vineyard management, as well as cellar work, is much more attuned to climate change now.

Stéphane Follin-Arbelet of Château de Meursault is a firm believer in cover crops, for example. “They’re important for the next decade. You shouldn’t work the soil too much; you lose humidity, and you lose biodiversity. Each time you work the soil you destroy something…. We can keep acidity with more leaves; cover crops lower the pH.”

Managing climate change is a series of small details; but it also means that different appellations come to the fore. Pommard and Nuits St-Georges, both villages famous for weighty, powerful wines, have tended to give more elegance in recent years, and that continues in 2019. Some, like the reds of the Côte de Beaune, have gained gravitas this year. The less famous, less expensive wines of the Hautes-Côtes are a good buy, too. In the past they could be skinny and austere; now they share in the general ripeness and sweetness of fruit. Santenay is looking good, and Corney & Barrow point out that where they used to list one Aligoté they now list half a dozen. It used to be so thin and unripe that the best thing to do with it was to add cassis. Not now. (What you do with cassis now is another question.)

Ask growers for comparisons with other vintages, and they can’t agree. Maybe 2015? Not quite. Or 2009, 2010? They’d be the choice of Guillaume d’Angerville of Domaine Marquis d’Angerville. Stéphane Follin-Arbelet settles instead for 1947, which would floor most of us.

So: hype? Probably not. Choose your producer with some care: not all wines will be available immediately, because a few producers now prefer to release wines in bottle only, and some, particularly those working more naturally and with less sulfur, didn’t want to courier samples to their merchants. These will be offered as and when.

It’s an often beautiful vintage; let’s settle for that.