WK's new 2020 and 2019 Burgundy Report

Tons here to unpack - I am so excited to find some time to read all the way through…

In the meantime wanted to start a thread for discussion, insights and perspectives…

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Was just about to start another thread regarding this because I saw that it coincided with the N Rhone report (finally).

Reports are starting to get repetitive. For the most part, you know who will be at the top. Not saying that a bad thing at all. Those producers are great and they deserve the accolades.

For burgundy, I’m intrigued by the Ramonet scores as they don’t seem to align with the reputation. I think that is what jumped out to me the most in this latest report and the last few to be honest. Not trying to debate here about scores and palates. Your palate is your palate and you like what you like regardless of the critic score.

For N Rhone. There goes Levet being on the “cheaper” side.

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Man, that’s a lot of Jadot.

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I value these reports not to see the great reviews on the unaffordable big names, but to discover up and comers. Plenty to dig into.

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Pardon my ignorance, but does WK review N. Rhone as well? And, without quoting score or breaching copyright, what happened to Levet? (Pro tip: Levet is a lot cheaper in France than it is in the USA.)

William does not. And nothing has happened to Levet, other than Joe having discovered it :wink:

Can someone just build boil for me what badass bottles are available for under 75 bucks? I read it but it is all Greek to me.

I certainly understand why you feel that way! I do think that I’ve “shuffled the deck” a bit (look where Lachaux and Duroché rank in the report, or Lamy, Henri Germain and Thomas Bouley from the Côte de Beaune), but any vintage report of two very good vintages that features the likes of Leroy, DRC and Coche is certainly going to look a bit iterative if you sort by score—unless something somewhere went badly wrong, which in 2019 and 2020 it happily didn’t. I hope there is added value, at least, in the producer profiles, which often go into quite a bit of detail about winemaking choices and evolutions at each domaine.

But while there are a couple of more under-the-radar names in the report (I would flag up Didier Fornerol and Michel Mallard in particular), that is something I try to do much more of in my annual Spring report, where I look at less famous appellations and less famous winemakers. I have spent a lot of time in the Chalonniase; last year I did a lot of Hautes-Côtes stuff; and this year I’m thinking of digging around a bit more in Fixin and Marsannay. I found that reviewing producers like this in the big end-of-year report was a bit of a waste of time, as everyone scrolls to the top and they don’t really get much exposure. I also don’t see the interest in reviewing producers whose wines are generally not sold as futures from barrel, so in Spring I taste from bottle.

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Try Fornerol’s 2019 Côte de Nuits-Villages!

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Got a few bottles otw! Thanks for the tip!



You’re fixin’ to dig around a bit more in Fixin?

I think this is probably the most value add from William’s report and is miles apart from other Burgundy reviewers (Jasper Morris maybe comes close).

Quite a few newer names come to mind from the 2020 report including Jean Marc Vincent, Guyon, Benoit Chevalier (although I feel the wines are a bit on the riper/heavier side, so maybe finding his feet?), Henri Magnien

Does anybody know why William stopped reviewing the Lamarche wines, after the 2016 vintage, or perhaps William may be able to respond? He described Nicole Lamarche as one of his favourite winemakers, at the time, so just seems a bit odd that her wines are no longer being reviewed. I would have liked to see his views for this vintage, although other reviews that I have seen, have been favourable.

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I certainly didn’t describe her as one of my favorite winemakers!

To be frank, despite talk of the wines getting better, I continue to think that they fall far short of the quality level to which they should aspire.

My comments at the time were:

Having heard much about alleged improvements at Domaine Lamarche, my visit here to taste the bottled 2015s left me disappointed. The domaine’s roster of appellations is formidable, and Nicole Lamarche declares that her aim is to capture elegance, freshness and fruit—an ambition that, in its own terms, I warmly applaud and would be delighted to champion. Elegance, however, is in the eye of the beholder, and I found these wines attenuated, diffuse and drying.

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I think this quote is from Neil Martin, not WK.

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Apologies, William and thank you, Joz, for clarifying. Sorry, my mistake, as I saw the review on ‘Wine Advocate’ and assumed that it was William’s. That will teach me. Apologies for any embarrassment caused, William, and thank you for your thoughts on this estate. It is certainly refreshing to read an honest and contrarian take on such a well-known wine maker.

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I love Fornerol but I think it is really the now highly-allocated and almost completely unavailable rue des foins that really shows the magic. Folks have caught on to that one now as I don’t think there is a single bottle in the market.

This part is particularly helpful William, thank you. The same is true of the videos.

Only saw the piece on Arnoux. No trimming. And no mowing. And shorter macerations. Fascinating stuff. He could just repeat key decisions every year and win accolades, and he continues iterating seemingly meaningfully (or that is how it reads to a non-farmer… me).

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Weird, I’m a subscriber, but didn’t get any notification about the report.