Burgundy 2015: blink and you’ll miss it

As Berry Bros & Rudd hosted its Burgundy En Primeur Tasting this week, db chatted with buyer Adam Bruntlett about off-the-scale demand, top-performing white appellations and the growing obsolescence of the Burgundy critic.

With Burgundy week winding down, just about everything that can be said about the 2015 vintage – the first for which Bruntlett has taken the lead buying role at BBR after four years of working closely with Jasper Morris MW – has been said: lowish yields but a very good vintage with excellent quality across the region, especially for reds.

Morris has previously written of “very dense, powerful” wines “with some of 2010’s charm” being suggested by early tastings of 2015, which, he said, may come to rival ‘05 – “probably the greatest young vintage of my career”.

Bruntlett, for his part, sees the ’15s as something of a combination of 2009 and 2010, but with more freshness than 2009 and “a bit more charm” than 2010.

Off the well-trodden path there remained one or two interesting talking points, however, starting with that off-the-scale demand and what that means for the traditional role of the Burgundy wine critic, and also looking at which ‘lesser’ appellations performed the best, Bruntlett sharing his enthusiasm for one or two white Burgundy producing areas.

Scale-tipping demand

To an extent the glowing praise for the 2015 vintage means very little – because, if BBR sales are anything to go by, most of us are not going to see very much of it. According to Bruntlett, BBR’s allocation of 2015 was already 90% sold before its en primeur tasting took place. Thanks to “unprecedented demand” and disappointingly low yields (worse than the already fairly meagre 2014) the merchant could have sold out four time over or more, he said.

Such is the way of things in fine wine, but pre-Burgundy week it did prompt a number of baleful cries, or tweets, from prominent wine trade figures. With demand for Burgundy so high and rising, and yields so persistently low, the traditional function that many Burgundy scribes perform of highlighting and rating wines is going the way of the dodo.

@HamishDAnderson critics becoming irrelevant for burgundy

— Jamie Goode (@jamiegoode) January 5, 2017

To a fairly large extent Bruntlett agreed with this assessment, emphasising, unsurprisingly, the importance of the Burgundy buyer’s relationship with his or her merchant above reliance on critics an their scores.

“For a lot of customers who have the money to buy top-end Burgundy, often what’s more important to them is the relationship they have with their merchant and how much they trust the merchant and their opinion on questions of the vintage,” he said.

“Journalists can help with building a reputation for somebody who doesn’t already have it … I do think people like Neal Martin, in particular, are very useful and he’s gaining in terms of his reputation. He’s obviously built a reputation in Bordeaux already, so that helps. But I think given the small amounts of wine and the high quality, people will buy regardless.”

Thoughts on whites

Since the story of the top Burgundy names and appellations had already been told, and the vast majority of the wines sold, where did Bruntlett think that value could be found elsewhere? While the story of the vintage was coloured red, the buyer believed whites presented some nice surprises.

“Whites are very good,” he said. “The good thing was, in a warm vintage like 2015, the worry is that they’re not fresh. but I think winemakers have learned from 2009 when very few succeeded in making fresh wines. I think it’s the opposite this year, the vast majority have done well. You have to look carefully at vineyard sites and growers, when they picked and how they work.”

So where did he think whites had fared best in 2015?

“Some sites with a bit of altitude or in a valley where it’s cooler with a bit of breeze… [and] actually on the flats, if there was a lot of clay in the soil, that helped to retain more moisture through the summer – so oddly, sometimes, the village wines offer really good value. The mid-slope is often better but the problem is there’s not quite as much topsoil – it’s a bit stonier and drier and they suffered from a bit more heat stress.

“St Aubin – a little bit cooler in a side valley has been good; Blagny, on the border of Meursault and Puligny, has been very good, St Romain as well, on the other côte – again, altitude and back away from the warmer slopes of the Côte D’Or. So there’s good value there.

“It’s a case of picking carefully, and knowing your grower and your vineyard sites, but there are a lot of very good whites. And they’re more approachable than the 14s I think. The white 15s are to drink before the 14s – enjoy them while you’re waiting for your 14s to come round, effectively.”

More generally, Bruntlett saw good value and immediate appeal in wines from some of the higher slopes and less celebrated villages.

“The good thing with a vintage like ’15 where there are perfect growing conditions is that the wines from top to bottom are good,” he said. “Bourgogne, Hautes-Côtes de Beaune, Hautes-Côtes de Nuits, villages wines offer excellent value. Lesser known villages like Marsannay, like Savigny-lès-Beaunes are also really good drinking wines – very appealing and forward.

“Although it’s a warm vintage, it’s not one where the vintage takes over the character of the vineyard or the village. There’s a transparency in the wines – you can see that it’s a Gevrey Chambertin and you can see the differences between the different vineyards of Gevrey, so there’s good definition and character – they don’t all just taste like ripe fruit.”

Harder still next year?

After what have been a flurry of tricky years for the Burgundy region, with below average yields almost the norm, one would hope that the outlook might be brighter for the 2016. One would hope in vain, however.

Serious hail and frost damage in April spelled disaster for some growers, and reducing overall yields for the region buy as much as half. This is before adverse fluctuations in sterling have made an impact. Qualitatively, the murmurings from growers are that what wine has been made is very good, but if we think 2015 vintage has presented challenges in terms of pricing and availability, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

“This year there was a strange sort of burning effect of the sun,” Bruntlett said, “so when the sun rose, the frost on the buds had a magnifier effect and burned the buds. As a result quite a lot of the well-exposed sites in the south-east, which get the morning sun, were completely destroyed.

“Villages such as Puligny, Santenay, Morey St Denis, they were less badly hit and some of them have got away with almost a full crop. But particularly the Hautes-Côtes – Savigny-lès-Beaunes, Chambolle-Musigny, the southern bit of Nuits-St-George, Aloxe-Corton as well – they were completely wiped out. There are some vineyards where the growers won’t make a wine.

“Commercially it will be a big challenge because the demand for Burgundy doesn’t show any sign of going down, despite the fact that this year, we had challenging economic conditions because of Brexit, which meant that in terms of exchange rate we’re 15-20% down on what we were looking at last year; that’s added into the fact that growers have increased their prices in ’15 because they knew already that ’16 was small…

“Already ’15 prices were quite high but the demand hasn’t shown any sign of dropping. We’ve sold them very well. [But] it’s very hard to see how we’ll get through ’16. It’s a big challenge because there’s a lot less wine. I would say we’re looking at 50% or a normal harvest, maybe less. Even less in Chablis. It’s a big challenge, definitely.”