Super Tuscans Steal the Show, and Weighing Burgundy 2021: Weekly Tasting Report (June 28-July 4)

Tuscany’s dynamic vintner, Bibi Graetz, led our tastings last week with his pair of super Tuscan reds stealing the show. His Testamatta and Colore from 2021 are terrific-quality wines, showing the intensity, vibrancy and structure that highlight the growing quest for drinkability in the best wines of Italy and the world at large despite the challenging weather patterns during the last five years in Tuscany.

“We have been scared like shit because it was hot all the time in the last few years, but the plants seem to get used to it,” Graetz told James. He admitted that he had also adjusted his viticulture practices to protect his crop during hot, dry and intensely sunny spells in the growing season, as well as picked his grapes earlier than in the past.

He said that he was not looking for the bold and powerful wines of the past, emphasizing extracted fruit and new wood barrels: “It’s a moment in the world to make wine for earlier drinking.”

The beautifully crafted chardonnay from Piedmont’s Gaja is another wine to take a look at in the report. It underlines the improving quality of whites in that region, particularly in higher-altitude areas, which have offered relief to vine growers during the recent hot vintages. James scored the Gaia & Rey 2021 96 points and was impressed with the wine’s complex and fresh fruit and undertones of barrel fermentation and aging.

Meanwhile, Senior Editor Stuart Pigott and Associate Editor Claire Nesbitt spent a long week in Burgundy tasting the 2021 vintage, and the good news is that they were mostly pleasantly surprised.

As Frederic Barnier, the head winemaker of Louis Jadot in Beaune told them, “2021 is not a cool and wet vintage as many people have said. For temperature and rainfall it lies very close to the average of the last 20 years. Both acidity and alcoholic content are moderate.” 

For this reason the wines tend to taste “classic” and will appeal to those Burgundy fans who found the exceptionally ripe and fruit-driven 2020s way too much for their taste.

More detailed analysis will follow in our Burgundy Report 2023, when Stuart and Claire have completed their tasting. However, 2021 is clearly an excellent vintage for whites with brighter (but not higher) acidity than the preceding vintages. They reminded Stuart of wines from the good vintages of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Two of the highest-rated wines were both from the same grand cru site, with more weight and body than the many other impressive chardonnays from 2021 that Stuart and Claire tasted. Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the greatest 2021 Montrachet of them all?

The Louis Latour Montrachet Grand Cru 2021 is so complex and smoky with notes of burnt sage, smoked almonds and sourdough. On the palate it is fleshy and mineral with a firm finish.

The Joseph Drouhin Montrachet Grand Cru Marquis de Laguiche 2021 has aromas of hazelnut, lemon curd, pie crust and apricots. It is powerful and concentrated with focus and tension.

Our anxiety about the quality of the vintage was focused on the reds. We wondered how the erratic weather pattern of the 2021 growing season could lead to the formation of really positive tannins. In fact, this happened quite often, and in some cases the tannins in the 2021 reds are really great.

Once again two wines stood out, and one of them representing a magnificent return to best form for the producer. The Domaine Georges Comte de Vogüé Musigny Grand Cru Vieilles Vignes 2021 is a sleeping giant with great concentration, stony minerality and drive at the finish, but it’s also extremely refined.

More powerful and expansive (which is true to the appellation) is the Louis Latour Chambertin Grand Cru Cuvée Héritiers Latour 2021, in which the richness is beautifully supported by the velvety tannins.

From the above you might think that the high points of 2021 are all grand cru wines with gigantic price tags. However, this is not the case. There are a bunch of wines from less exalted appellations with excellent quality, none more so than the spectacular red, single-vineyard wines from Domaine Charles Audoin in Marsannay.

Once again we couldn’t decides which was the brightest star. If it's aromatic complexity and elegance you’re looking for – fantastic flavors packed tightly into medium-body – then we recommend the Domaine Charles Audoin Marsannay Les Favières 2021. If you want a darker and more brooding red wine with more muscle, then go for the Domaine Charles Audoin Marsannay Au Champ Salomon 2021.

There were also tastings in which every wine shone from village up to grand cru, including our first visit to Domaine Jacques Prieur in Meursault. Read the notes below and you will find a lot more. Of course, the prices for the most sought-after wines continue to spiral out of control, but more about that in our Burgundy Report 2023 in a few weeks’ time.

FOR BAROSSA, ALL ABOUT THE DETAILS

In Australia, Senior Editor Ned Goodwin MW was tasting the wines of Barossa Valley, where he noted a shift to lighter and fresher wine styles but lamented the paucity of grenache and mataro – varieties as well suited to the region as they are to other warmer Australian zones. More current, considerably more exciting and a better reason to celebrate the region's wines, Ned said, is for the superior tannin management being practiced by Barossa’s better producers.

"To write of Barossa’s shift back to freshness is a cliched trope," Ned said. "After all, Barossa has been doing this for a while now, as have other regions around the world. This said, there are still plenty of clunky, overly oaked wines. Buxom styles service a clientele whose expectations are founded on an outdated critical rubric that celebrated excess over detail, longevity and complexity.

"Today, Barossa’s best are welding detail while contouring rivets into a savory, increasingly complex patina of lower fermentation temperatures to moderate bombast, together with longer, less aggressive maceration periods to glean noble grape tannins, while polymerizing them with shorter periods in less new oak, better seasoned and from quality sources rather than a local cooperage, once pervasive. These are but a few approaches that impressed while tasting nearly 250 wines during the visit."

The quality of tannins demonstrated by the Hayes Family Shiraz Barossa Valley Block 15, from the wonderful 2021 vintage, along with wines from Sami-Odi and Utopos in general, is exceptional, Ned said: "They shape-shift from taut, ripe, subtly abrasive to smooth and alloyed; from a ball-bearing-like precision to a drape of chamois across the mouth, all with the structural intent of corralling and compressing Barossa’s fruit into a savory, balanced whole.

"There would be even better wines in the Barossa were there more grenache and mataro vines in the ground," Ned continued. "Today, the former makes up less than five percent of the region’s plantings; the latter, less than two. Thanks to an endemic myopia manifest as the Vine Pull Scheme of the mid-1980s, extremely old vines, history etched in their every gnarl, were pulled up in the name of productive ones. These included chardonnay, attesting to the madness of the project! Mercifully there is little, if any, left in the Barossa today.

"Torbreck, Tscharke, Spinifex, Teusner and Henschke champion old-vine grenache and mataro. Many are planting new vineyards, too. Yet Marco Cirillo of Cirillo Estate Wines is the candid crusader for Barossa’s old-vine furniture. His 1850 grenache 2017 is putatively from the oldest grenache in the world, and his less expensive Vincent grenache 2021 offers superlative value."

– James Suckling, Stuart Pigott and Ned Goodwin MW contributed reporting.

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated during the past week by James Suckling and the other tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. Some will be included in upcoming tasting reports.

Note: You can sort the wines below by country, vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.