Burgundy Hits the Bullseye With 2019 Vintage

During my week of intensive tasting in Burgundy at the end of July it became clear to me that the 2019 vintage has hit the bullseye. Almost every winemaker I spoke with talked about the vintage’s rare combination of excellence and great consistency. Sometimes they expressed this graphically. For example, Dimitri Bazas, the director of Maison Champy in Beaune, said to me, “If you offer me a contract for 30 years and it promises me that every year will be like 2019, then I would say, where do I sign?”

In many ways, Maison Champy’s wines say everything about what makes the 2019 vintage in Burgundy so exciting. They own land in the Grand Cru sites Corton-Charlemagne (whites) and Le Corton (reds), and their 2019s from those sites are their highest-rated wines in this report. However, Maison Champy also made excellent 2019 village wines, like the Pernand-Vergelesses (white), and Pommard and Volnay (reds) that are more moderately priced. These, along with similar 2019 Burgundies from other leading producers, offer an excellent buying opportunity.

Was it possible to go wrong in Burgundy in 2019? Yes, because we found a small number of wines that tasted as if the grapes had been picked too late, leading to elevated alcohol content, low acidity and a lack of bright aromas. Those were definitely not our favorites!

TWO MASTERPIECES

A great Burgundy vintage usually yields some breathtakingly exciting wines, and 2019 brought a string of those. Of the wines I tasted (I visited 12 producers in the region), the pinnacle among the whites is the extraordinarily mineral and racy Bouchard Pere & Fils’ Chevalier-Montrachet Grand Cru 2019, and for the reds it is Louis Latour’s incredibly perfumed and silky Romanée-Saint Vivant Grand Cru Les Quatre Journaux 2019. It doesn’t get any better than these masterpieces, but study the notes below and you’ll see that a slew of other 2019 white and red Burgundies are hot on their heels.

What do the excellent and great 2019 Burgundies have in common and where did those qualities come from? At almost every tasting I was struck by how beautifully the ripe yet precise fruit, the elegant tannins and the lively acidity gelled on the palate. Although all the top red wines from the pinot noir grape have excellent aging potential, most of them are already open and enjoyable. That reminds me of great modern vintages like 1985 and 2009.

In view of the premature oxidation (“premox”) problems that have afflicted many white Burgundies since the mid-1990s, we are much more cautious about predicting the aging potential of the white 2019s. However, many wines taste as if they have excellent aging potential. And producers are clearly more careful in the viticulture and winemaking.

The reason for the near ideal ripeness and special personality of the vintage lies in a growing season that was the third-warmest year of the last century, but it brought only two short blasts of extreme heat at the end of June and the end of July. There was enough rain to prevent serious drought stress to the vines, and the only real negatives were some frost damage in April and hail in July – neither catastrophic.

READ MORE BURGUNDY: SPOTLIGHT ON VINTAGE 2018 AND A TRIAL OF WARM HARVESTS

So, all’s well in Wine Paradise? No, not really. This begins with the yields in 2019. The reds were generally a bit down, but the whites were often well below average. On top of that, as Franck Grux, the technical director of Olivier Leflaive in Puligny-Montrachet, one of the most important white Burgundy producers, pointed out, “You had to wait for the phenolic maturity of the grapes. I waited 10 days longer before harvesting than usual.”

That delay wasn’t without consequences, because the combination of a modest crop and good weather resulted in rapid sugar accumulation in the chardonnay grapes. Alcoholic fermentation converts grape sugar into alcohol, and some 2019 white Burgundies topped 14 percent alcohol.

However, as Gregory Patriat of J.C. Boisset in Nuits-Saint-Georges explained, “the last phase of ripening for the whites also concentrated the acidity.” As a result, most of the very ripe whites also have a fresh acidity that makes them feel lighter than they really are. That certainly includes J.C. Boisset’s excellent 2019 whites.

PRICE PRESSURE

Perversely, the other cloud on the horizon results from the region’s rapidly expanding sales. Bruno Pepin, the sales and marketing director of Louis Latour, reported that the Korean market doubled in each of the last two years, the U.K. was up more than 40 percent in 2020 and the U.S. has surged back since the tariffs on European Union wines were withdrawn early in 2021. That’s no isolated case – it’s the general tendency across the region.

This increase in global demand is putting pressure on prices, and it seems that they continue to go up from the simplest of appellations to Grand Crus. The problem is that the generous 2018 vintage was followed by two small crops, with the forthcoming 2021 harvest expected to be the smallest in decades. We therefore recommend you move fast, particularly for the 2019 whites.

And what is our hottest tip? Global warming’s influence on Burgundy provides the answer in the high-altitude sites and those that are cool for other reasons. For example, Domaine Boris Champy’s Bourgogne Hautes-Côtes de Beaune Elevation 382 2019 comes from a very unsexy appellation – the name declares that the vineyard is 382 meters above sea level. In the past this was a recipe for unripeness in most vintages, but in the new climatic situation it means freshness and minerality. This wine is an impressive debut for the new winery of Boris Champy, the former director of Domaine des Lambrays.

Among the reds, I also found many wines from “lesser” appellations that were similarly impressive. A spectacular example of this is Charles Audoin’s Marsannay Les Favières 2019. It’s only a lieu-dit (a village wine from an unclassified vineyard site), but the wine tastes like a great Premier Cru, or even a Grand Cru. Winemaker Cyril Audoin would be much better known if Marsannay, at the northern tip of the Cote d’Or, hadn’t been long regarded as the poor cousin to nearby Gevrey-Chambertin. The latter is now one of the most sought-after village appellations, with a corresponding price tag.

Now, many of Burgundy’s leading producers are taking very seriously Marsannay and other forgotten corners of their region that show potential. The Burgundian vineyard classification may be carved in stone, but for those interested in this region’s wines, the map is rapidly changing with the climate. It means lots of opportunities for buying and drinking Burgundy!

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated for this report by the tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many of the latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. 

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