I spent a fascinating week in Hong Kong leading up to Chinese New Year. The Year of the Dragon is now in full swing and so, it would appear, is a new found appreciation for Burgundy.

Among the high spots were the ‘Long Lunch’, a sort of mini Paulée held at the Hong Kong Cricket Club, who supplied a match to watch to boot. However we spent more time concentrating on the wines than on the cricket, generous guests bringing bottles from Lafon, Blain-Gagnard, Vougeraie, Roumier, Grivot, de Montille, Rossignol-Trapet, Perrot-Minot, Cathiard, Rémy, Fourrier, Dugat-Py and more.

The key will be to encourage appreciation right across the range and this should be possible. Wines such as Sylvain Loichet’s Ladoix Bois de Gréchon have found favour already, and good quality Bourgogne Rouge is being snapped up. As we expected, the learning curve develops frighteningly quickly.

We did many more wine events this year with Cantonese food which is a stimulating development. I like the idea of having lots of bottles open on the table so you can grab a sip of whichever one might please you with whichever nibble of dim sum or peking duck catches your fancy. Dishes which I really enjoyed this week included braised pomelo skins and some baby roast pigeon. Apparently I was just too late for seasonal snake soup.

I have just emerged from under the cosh of preparing January’s Grand Burgundy Offer unveiling the 2010 vintage. This time of year is always very high pressure – firstly we need to taste the whole range of wines – around 500 of them – and prepare tasting notes; then there is the frantic whipping in of prices and allocations form producers who promise to let us know the news by the end of November but rarely do. I should look up the French word for Deadlines.

Too late now, the offer has gone to the printers and will land on doorsteps throughout the land in time for the new campaign to kick off on Wednesday 4th January. Then the fur will fly because the wines are exceptional in 2010 but there is very little volume compared to last year. Delicious reds in a classic style, with excellent balance between fruit, acidity and tannins. The whites are also mostly very impressive, generous wines with good acidity, while Chablis is superb.

Jasper Morris MW

The harvest in the Côte d’Or is now pretty much over and the growers are happier than expected. Though the weather forecasts indicated that there would be rain at any moment during the fortnight of the harvest, in fact it stayed dry until some storms passed through on Sunday 11^th, by which time virtually everything was picked.

Clearly it is not even across the board – this is definitely a year which required all due care and attention throughout the growing season – but the good guys are thoroughly pleased with the final results.  The general consensus seems to be:

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Halfway through the season we knew it would be an early harvest, almost certainly kicking off in August, but the character of the year was yet to be defined with the beautiful spring weather tailing off somewhat as June replaced May. However the sun came back with a vengeance at the end of June, flirting with 40°C , and causing some grilling of the grapes. The first week in July was dry too, bringing thoughts of 1976 back into view. When it rained, solidly and evenly without stormy side effects, on Thursday 7th July the growers were thrilled – it’s a present from the gods, its like gold, they said!

But further rain over the next few days was less welcome and the whole month of July proved cooler and wetter than usual. Having started to talk about bringing forward the harvest from the initially suggested 25th August, producers were now pushing back towards the beginning of September. Indeed veraison was by no means complete at the end of July, and the grapes are usually ripe for harvest one month after colour change.

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Of all vintages in my 30 years of experience with Burgundy, 2001 is the year I have found the most difficult to pin down. The growing season was a touch anonymous with good weather in late May, late August and thankfully during the harvest in late September, but otherwise too many cool, grey and somewhat rainy periods, including the all important first three weeks of September. For whatever reason, to date, I have never been able to put my finger on the particular character associated with the wines of this vintage.

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A moderately severe winter, though without the deep freeze of the previous year, ended early and a fine spring was ushered in from the middle of March. The wind patterns were unusual, blowing mainly from the north (the benchmark wind on Palm Sunday), cool and dry, or veering right round to the south, warm and dry. Normally a south wind then swings to the south-west and brings rain, but not this year. (more…)

Tuesday April 5th is a great day to remember for me. During the afternoon we had a very constructive meeting to develop plans for e-publishing Inside Burgundy. Exactly how ambitious we can be with the electronic version is still work in progress, but watch this space!

Then we went en masse – Simon Berry as publisher, our publishing colleagues Chris Foulkes and Carrie Segrave, and our wonderful designer Lizzie Ballantyne – to the Goring Hotel for the André Simon Food & Wine Book Awards. It was a strong field this year among the wine books so we were very nervous, definitely hopeful but no more than that. Sarah-Jane Evans MW was presiding over the wine book and I got less and less hopeful as she sang the praises of all four short listed books –

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Waking up in Kyoto to a cloudless sky……I could not have enjoyed my visit to Kyoto more. At dinner on the night I arrived, the first guest introduced himself to me with the words ‘I read modern history at Oxford in the late 1970s’ which had a certain familiarity. The title of his recent article “Even a sardine’s head becomes holy: the role of household encyclopedias in sustaining civilisation in pre-industrial Japan” has a classic tongue-in-academic-cheek ring to it.
Kyoto sits in a bowl surrounded by mountains, giving a skyline resembling the Cloudy Bay label whichever way you look. We had an 8.00am start the following morning, not to begin the days tasting, but to visit various temples and gardens: the Kiyomizu temple and the golden Kinkakuji temple, along with the rock garden at Ryoanji stand out. Then the Bullet Train back to Tokyo, keeping time despite a blizzard of snow.

Other highlights included a press lunch accompanied by the exquisite food of Pierre Gagnaire. I suppose this cuisine could be called fusion but it was so brilliantly perceived and executed that it was hard to imagine that France and Japan were not eternally fused in culinary harmony.

There were so many fabulous wine dinners that I am quite glad to have returned in one piece. Dinners at Mosaique and Bulgari stand out, along with a finale at La Belle Epoque in the Hotel Okura where I was staying. I was brilliantly looked after at this lovely Hotel. Sommelier Egawa-san presided over our superb wine dinner on the final night.

This year’s trip was coloured by the incipient Chinese New Year, a festival of much greater magnitude here than 31st December/1st January is in Europe. Mind you it is rash to offer any generalities about Hong Kong because this city changes so fast. I really enjoy seeing so many different phases of life in such a short space of time, and place. One minute was a grand western-style meal in a sought after location with views high over the city – Café Gray for example, or Amuse Bouche, where we had a brilliant dinner with biodynamic wines, the next a street meal – Dai Pai Dong – though we did cheat a bit by washing down our immaculate dumplings with a bottle of Corton-Charlemagne.

Wherever you go in Hong Kong you bump into old friends, also just passing through – Sylvain Pitiot of Clos de Tart broke his journey from Paris tio Auckland with half a day in Hong Kong, nipping in to the city centre to have lunch at Alfie’s.

Appreciation of Burgundy has changed so rapidly in Hong Kong. This is a material city and five years ago the only question seemed to be ‘how does this wine compare to DRC?’ The investment angle is certainly still there, but now there are so many more people who want to find out the story behind, and who appreciate the subtleties of the wines. Burgundy has a great future here.

Burgundy 2009 season is now in full swing. The main events have already taken place in London and I am about to travel to Japan and Hong Kong to talk Burgundy with our enthusiastic teams there. This will be work rather than play, but I shall get a chance to do both when I go to New York in February.

I will be taking part in La Paulée de New York for the first time, leading a panel tasting with Becky and Peter Wasserman (my neighbours in Burgundy) as part of the three days of festivities which make up La Paulée. The Paulée is a traditional Burgundian celebration held at the end of each harvest and, nowadays, the New York event each February is held in very high regard, with some of Burgundy’s most respect winemakers on attendance, as well as many leading American wine collectors. I have heard so much about this event and look forward to taking part.

This will also be my opportunity to launch Inside Burgundy in the USA with a signing session during La Paulée – I am delighted to be working with Sotheby’s who will be distributing the book in the US market.

I have been too busy to blog of late: not just launching Inside Burgundy, but also preparing January’s Grand Burgundy Offer which is heading off to the printers even as I type. Several weeks of intense tasting, hard work but enjoyable, then the writing up of the tasting notes which soon drives home the paucity of my vocabulary compared to the subtle distinctions between one wine and another.

I have been trying to find the right balance between enthusiasm for the new vintage and not going over the top in ‘hype’. The rich, ripe soft fruit might easily have reminded me of 1959 had I been old enough to taste them at the same stage. Like ’59 I think 2009 is really exciting in both colours. After all this in depth immersion in Burgundy I am going to take a break and enjoy some old Bordeaux in the next few days. Among the treats tonight will be a Danish bottling of Château Pavie Macquin 1947, discovered while I was signing books in Copenhagen last month!

In preparation for our offer of 2009 Burgundy in January a small yet perfectly-formed squad from our Fine Wine team visited the region last week, headed by one of our greatest assets: Jasper Morris MW.  The week proved to be a very busy and rewarding one.  These trips are a treat, and a treat that I love each year, though 450 wines in four and a half days is rather taxing.  Thankfully the nature of the vintage is such that (a) the wines were rather easy to taste and (b) the quality of the vintage is so high that we tasted next to no duds.

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I must say I feel rather sorry for Jasper Morris, Burgundy Buyer for Berry Bros. and Master of Wine. When he first visited Hong Kong in 2005, his trip might have included some leisurely lunches and tastings with the select few who were developing a passion for the region of Burgundy and its spectacular wines. Fast-forward five years and in a three-day whirlwind tour of dinners, interviews, master classes and tastings, there was barely a second to draw breath. On making this rather apologetic observation at the end of the first day of his trip (his crammed schedule was, in part, down to me), I was relieved to be greeted with a grin, “This is exactly how it should be!” enthused Jasper, “no time to let the jet-lag set in!”. Of course this was no ordinary trip as clutched in Jasper’s right hand was the culmination of all his unsurpassed experience in one of the most complex and revered wine growing areas in the world, his new book Inside Burgundy.

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Thursday 23rd September – a great day for me to remember! I drove shortly after dawn to Le Montrachet having got the call from Dominique Lafon the night before that he was ready to pick. While waiting for his team to arrive I bumped into Aubert de Villaine who was planning to pick the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Le Montrachet as well, and Jean-Claude Bachelet (driving a 1950 citroen truck!) whose team was ready to attack their Chassagne-Montarchet 1er cru les Blanchots which is right next door to le Montrachet.

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With the 2010 harvest imminent and the glorious 2009s due to hit the market shortly, it is easy to lose sight of earlier vintages. I have just had the opportunity though to review the red wines of 2007 in great detail.

Nicknamed ‘Burgfest’, a tasting takes place every year when a group of importers along with Clive Coates and Neil Beckett (World of Fine Wine Magazine) meet to assess a recent vintage of Burgundy. About 300 wines at 1er and Grand Cru level are tasted across the best part of three days, in small flights never exceeding 12 wines, grouped by village or in some cases vineyard. The wines are tasted blind.

This is the first opportunity for an intensive assessment of a vintage since the round of en primeur tastings when many wines are not in bottle and others have not yet settled down immediately after the bottling. The purpose of the Burgfest tasting is to assess the development of the vintage as well as to see which growers and wines have performed well in that particular year. We are there to find out, more than to deliver judgement.  Click here to read our findings on the best performers of the vintage.

Jasper Morris MW’s new book, ‘Inside Burgundy‘ is about to be released. To register your interest in receiving a copy, please click here.

Time for a glass of champagne rather than Burgundy – in order to celebrate Burgundy! My book on the vineyards and vignerons of Burgundy, titled ‘Inside Burgundy’ – we resisted the temptation to go with ‘The Sex Life of Burgundy’, though it is certainly true that gaining an understanding of the human relationships among the vignerons can go far to explaining the style of their wines – has at long last gone to press.

 Here are the bare bones – 656 pages, commentary on 1,000 or so different vineyards from generic to grand cru, and from Chablis to Pouilly Fuissé. Thumbnails of 450 producers, vintage reports, and plenty of background to what makes Burgundy what it is. I am starting to get very excited indeed!

We shall be promoting the book from early September, with physical delivery expected in the second half of October. Watch this space!

We had a bit of a treat last week when we celebrated the 900th anniversary of the extraordinary vineyard called Clos Blanc de Vougeot. It is well known how the monks of Cîteaux, having established their new monastery in 1098, started to plant up what is now the Clos de Vougeot from 1110. Fewer people are aware that they singled out the vineyard next door, known as La Vigne Blanche or Clos Blanc de Vougeot, as being clearly a white wine site and planted accordingly. There are hardly any white vineyards in the Côte de Nuits, but this one has been in existence for nine centuries.

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Major storms in the Mâconnais and Beaujolais on Sunday 6th June have inconvenienced local growers, with torrents of rain bringing the topsoil down the hillside. There are unlikely to be any lasting problems, just extra work at one of the busiest times of the year. Otherwise the flowering has been taking place over the last few days, suggesting a vintage around 20th-25th September for most of Burgundy, with Chablis scarcely behind the Côte d’Or. It is cool and cloudy now – we definitely need a bit of sunshine and warmth.

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For the last several weeks I have been much more in Beaujolais mode than Burgundy, prospecting for suppliers to add to the range to take advantage both of the brilliance of 2009 in the region, and also what I perceive to be a renewed interest in the region from trade, press and consumers alike. Thank goodness, it is about time!

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I have just been down to Beaujolais and up to Chablis to check out the 2009s from these regions. The visit to Chablis was particularly reassuring because I had some worries that the sunny conditions of the 2009 vintage might have led to atypical Chablis, fat and sassy chardonnay without the underlying austerity which is the hallmark of the appellation. Not so, there is a lovely freshness alongside the weight of the wines.

The real revelation this year, though, is Beaujolais. It comes at a moment when the world seems keen to see a revival of this once iconic region. There is a renaissance in particular among the ‘crus’, with single vineyard sites coming to the fore. In 2009 almost all the wines seem absolutely lovely, from straight Beaujolais upwards, as long as the producer has not gone over to the dark side of artificial yeasts and thermovinification. There will be some gorgeous wines to drink this summer, and then a wave of more serious bottlings later in the year which could be fascinating if laid away for the medium to long term. I am clearing space for various Morgons and Moulin a Vents to put away in my own cellar.

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