This is a subject to which I am devoting some thought, as I am just finishing up my TWA report on the 2019 vintage from barrel and 2018 revisited from bottle! So some brief observations / opinions:
The 2018 white Burgundy is a ripe vintage in the sense that the fruit tones have a more or less “sun kissed” profile, and that the pHs are a touch higher than average, but because of the very high yields—the highest since 1999 or even 1982, with >100 hectoliters per hectare being talked about in some rather grand AOCs—the wines are generally far from concentrated. So they are very different from a ripe vintage such as 2015 for example, or now 2019, which are both characterized by below-average yields, thick skins and as a result lots of concentration and extract. 2018 whites are generally rather open-knit, giving and demonstrative. If the less successful 2015s are a bit thick and rich and high in alcohol, the less successful 2018s are a bit soft and diffuse and dilute. Without the sulfur/oak/suspended lees that gave them a bit more grip in barrel, some of the wines I have tasted lately have been really quite insipid, lacking in flavor, cut and grip.
So if the high yields, by retarding ripening (the larger the crop, the slower ripening), in a sense saved the vintage from becoming utterly extreme (think 2003 whites, which the 2018s do not at all resemble), they are also the year’s Achilles’ heel.
At this point, one might be inclined to observe that some of the great old white Burgundy vintages were also very high yielding: 1979 and 1982 most obviously. And I think some of the best 2018s will surprise us with bottle age: Jean-Marc Roulot for one is counting on this, as he has kept a lot of wine at the domaine to release later. But there are some respects in which years such as 1982 and 2018 are hard to compare. Firstly, acidities were higher in 1982. And secondly, the grapes were pressed very differently, as this was still the era of rather brutal Vaslin mechanical presses and even manually operated vertical presses: these necessarily resulted in musts with more dry extract and more suspended solids (so ones with more lees) than the pneumatic presses of today. And in order to process the large volumes of fruit, many producers in 2018 opted for shorter than usual press cycles, extracting even less from grapes that were already inherently lacking in potential extract.
All of that said, there are some very attractive 2018 white Burgundies, that in a sense transcend the vintage or perhaps simply show what was possible. Jean-Marc Roulot made lovely wines which he is rightly proud of. Thierry Pillot’s 2018 Caillerets stands out as a 2018 that might well be better than its 2017 counterpart, and Guillaume Boillot thinks his 2018 Clos de la Mouchère superior to his 2019 (he pressed everything with a vertical basket press in 2018, by the way). Jean-Marie Guffens used the lowest pH press fractions from his oldest vines to produce his top cuvées, and they are amazing. The list could go on, and it will in my full vintage report.
It is definitely a vintage which favored the top sites and old vines, and again I think this is a function of yields. The top sites were able to bring their crops to physiological maturity in synch with optimal sugar accumulation. So the hierarchy of appellations, which can be to some extent effaced by smaller crops brought to full maturity, is actually more than usually apparent in 2018.
As far as what I purchased myself, I would say I bought so far about 1/3 of what I bought in the 2017 vintage (admittedly my daughter’s birth year), but still a lot more than I bought in 2016, and about the same as what I bought in 2015. I’m happy to have what I have, and, having tasted most of them from bottle, I’ll let them sleep for a bit but likely attack them before the 2017s from the same producers.