2019 Burgundy Verticals by Stephen Tanzer

The Format of My Tastings

All of the producers I visited in December presented their wines in the same way: from youngest to oldest, with the bottles uncorked shortly before the tasting and not decanted. Beginning with the youngest vintage and working backward has always been my preferred approach to vertical tastings, for the simple reason that this order allows me to understand how wines develop with bottle age. But I should also note that at the vertical tastings of California Cabernets that producers have staged for me in recent years, a sizable minority of makers have begun with the oldest vintage and finished with the youngest, under the assumption that starting with the youngest and most tannic wines would numb the palate and leave it less able to appreciate the subtleties of older, mellower vintages. 

The Burgundies were also served at ideal, properly cool temperature—no higher than 64 or 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and in a few cases a couple degrees cooler than that. The cool temperature of the wines, and the fact that they were not given an extended pre-tasting aeration, allowed tasters to experience the most vibrant initial aromas of even the oldest bottles and follow them as their bouquet developed in the glass, warming only slightly at December-in-Burgundy room temperature.

I must also note that as these wines were taken from the producers’ long-term storage, most had not yet had labels affixed (this normally happens in Burgundy when bottles are being prepared for sale), so that most of the bottles I tasted were simply identified with their vintage written in chalk. As a result, my snapshots of most of my vertical line-ups are distinctly un-photogenic.

For my red wine tastings, I asked each producer to present the following vintages: 2012, 2010, 2009, 2005, 2003, 2002, 1999, 1995, 1993, 1990, 1988 and 1985 (for whites, the list was slightly different). I also invited them to fill in a few more vintages, especially ones of which they were particularly proud, and perhaps a few older vintages as well. I was able to taste nearly all of the vintages I requested, although I missed a few that were no longer available. Back in New York, I filled in a few key missing wines from my own cellar (though none in the case of Château de la Tour), including some from what are generally viewed as lesser vintages. I will note “tasted in New York” for these wines.