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.

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

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:

• A large crop of healthy whites. Serious growers have come in a little under the official maximum yield but doubtless there are cowboys who have gone well over. Overcroppers will have had trouble ripening their grapes.
• A small crop of reds which have needed sorting to deselect rot. Happily people know how to do this these days, and otherwise the grapes were healthy with small bunches due to millerandage after flowering. There was some uneven ripeness too.
• Relatively low sugar levels compared to recent years but thick skins with good colour extraction and a ripe feel to them
• Lowish acidity yet with good pH balance. The acidity is more tartaric than malic, which means that little will be lost in the malolactic fermentation
• A small but superb vintage in the Beaujolais!

I went down to the Maconnais on Monday to see the last grapes coming in chez Olivier Merlin. His vines were still in excellent condition with glowing golden grapes – a very happy man!

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.

Overall the season was less stormy than expected apart from minor hail in Corton-Charlemagne, Gevrey-Chambertin and Puligny-Montrachet, plus one really devastating storm in Rully on 12th July following a more minor attack in June.

August began clear and sunny but the July pattern of showery days returned with temperatures below or approaching the seasonal norm. There was at least some rain fall from 3rd to 8th August and again on 12th, 14th and 15th, though little sustained rain and happily avoiding any violent storms. But some local rot was now appearing in a few red wine vineyards, though the whites continued to look healthy.

I bumped into local oenologist Veronique Girard on the 16th and she reported lower malic and higher tartaric acidity compared to the equally early season of 2007, a good thing as the wines will be better balanced. Meanwhile a period of hot humid weather began on 17th with heavy overnight rain, continuing though without precipitation for the best part of a week. Then, on Wednesday 24th came a break in the weather after another hot start. The wind swung round to the northwest and brought occasional showers, with rumbles of thunder, along with a welcome drop in temperature.

One or two people began on 24th, picking plots which were ahead of schedule or in danger of major rot issues, but the weather forecast was poor for Thursday (in fact just one very heavy shower over lunch) and terrible on Friday (heavy rain for most of the day, while Saturday was grey and drizzly in the morning before perking up in the afternoon. The sun returned on Sunday but with lower temperatures and a fresher feel, allowing the ground time to dry out without advancing any rot too precipitately.

We could certainly have done without the rain at the end of last week, but nonetheless all is set fair for harvest to begin in earnest this week, with a relatively good forecast to look forward to. There is not much difference in timing between Côte de Beaune and Côte de Nuits this year, with the Mâconnais a bit further behind.

A ‘Ten Year On’ tasting held by Clive Coates and Becky Wasserman with many of the growers also participating gave me a chance to put that right, and so it has. The full details are apparent in the main article here which includes tasting notes on all the leading wines,

2001 falls short of a first class vintage but there is much to enjoy. You sense the slight lack of sunshine, especially in the bouquets which rarely leap out of the glass in seductive fashion. The whites were perhaps more ready, some beginning to tire, others still in their prime.

There were virtually no red wines which seemed to be tiring. There were no truly outstanding wines either, lacking the extra coat of velvet which a great year can give. The style of 2001 is a touch on the austere side but the fruit is there to be appreciated and the structure is balanced. Hardly a tasting note remarked on either a surplus or a deficit of acidity, and very rarely did tannins impinge.

One interesting observation was how well the wines showed where stems had been used during vinification – Domaines de la Romanée Conti, Dujac, Lambrays, de l’Arlot and from the Côte de Beaune de Courcel and Chandon de Briailles for example.

It should be noted that the wines were not tasted blind and that the samples came directly from the producers’ own cellars, hence stored under the best possible conditions. Many producers provided magnums and these have been marked (M) in the text.

Two previous vintages were in everybody’s mind: 2007 began with an equally precocious spring including an exceptionally glorious April, calmed a little bit in May and declined noticeably thereafter. 1976 was a year of severe drought and considerable heat. In both cases the vintage began in August. (Note 2003 was quite different, the season being marked by prolonged and exceptional heat spikes in late June and the first half of August).

The first flowers were seen as early as May 10th, almost exactly the same as in 2007, and properly looked after vineyards were bursting with health – those which had never been ploughed looked much stragglier. There was a long term fear for the build up of drought problems however, especially if the season was to develop along 1976 lines. However, as in 2007, May was a little cooler than April and with a few more showers, occasionally storms. The village sages were talking of a hot and stormy summer – apparently the magpies were nesting close to the houses which they do when storms are in the offing…

Useful rain followed in early June rapidly followed by a hosepipe ban which immediately brought more rain – could this be the same deteriorating pattern as 2007? Let us hope not – it does not feel that way, and rarely do vintages repeat themselves so closely. Fingers crossed for the next two months and for a successful harvest starting at the end of August.

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 –

GROGAN’S COMPANION TO DRINK
by Peter Grogan
Published by Virgin Books
INSIDE BURGUNDY
by Jasper Morris
Published by Berry Bros & Rudd Press

READING BETWEEN THE VINES
by Terry Theise
Published by University of California Press

WINE MYTHS AND REALITY
by Benjamin Lewin MW
Published by Vendange Press

However, as you may by now have guessed, the final magic words – “and the winner is…. Inside Burgundy!” brought joy and relief. A great result for Berry Bros & Rudd Press with their first book, and for Chris and Carrie who have now achieved 8 André Simon award winners in their publishing career.

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.

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.

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.