Blind Vision: 2015 Burgundy Red & White

BY NEAL MARTIN | NOVEMBER 13, 2018

Bordeaux is a dog. A dog will always fetch the stick or come to heel. Dogs are predictable. But a cat? You never know what a cat might be up to at any given moment—licking its paws or catching mice. Cats are as unpredictable as opening a bottle of Burgundy. You never know what to expect until you pull the cork. Burgundy is a cat….

Vinous, meet Burgfest; Burgfest, meet Vinous. I feel that a formal introduction is necessary since I often name-check Burgfest in my prose. No, it is not an offshoot of the Glastonbury music festival, headlined by Dominique Lafon on the Pyramid Stage and Aubert de Villaine reading poetry up in the Field of Avalon. Instead, Burgfest is the affectionate term for an annual tasting of the applicable Burgundy vintage one year after bottling, the whites assessed in late May and the reds in early September. This year, it was the 2015s’ turn to step forward. Clive Coates MW inaugurated the tasting many moons ago, and members of the group have changed over the years. There are only 10 or 11 seats around the table. Once you have a seat, it is yours until you retire, like the House of Lords but with less wine consumption. I joined in 2013, and since then, Burgfest has become one of the most important tastings in my calendar each year.

Burgfest is probably unique in terms of its comprehensiveness. In total, growers, including blue-chip names, contribute just shy of 500 Premier and Grand Crus. While there is, sadly, no Domaine de la Romanée-Conti or Leroy, there are bottles from Comte du Liger-Belair, Jean Grivot, Armand Rousseau, Georges/Christophe Roumier, Domaine des Comtes-Lafon, Dujac and Clos de Tart, to name but a few. The crux of Burgfest is that all wines are assessed single-blind against their peers. The Meursault Charmes are blindfolded and lined up into one flight, the Meursault Perrières into another and so forth. It is the one occasion where I can juxtapose all five Clos St.-Jacques and play “Guess the La Romanée,” which this year I was able to identify. Alas, the prize was not a bottle of La Romanée. Where there are insufficient numbers of wines, flights are combined; after all, assessing every single Clos de Tart from a single vintage is a rather short exercise. In many ways, Burgfest is the most mentally and intellectually challenging of all the tastings in which I participate. You must not only analyze the intrinsic properties of the wine, but also simultaneously consider the terroir—to wit, the expectations of, say, Malconsorts vis-à-vis Aux Brûlées. To ratchet your stress levels higher, scores and their justifications are announced to the group so that results can be pooled together after identities are revealed.

All bottles are decanted in an adjoining room by our helper, who decides the order of pouring. As you might guess, a few trips to the recycling center are necessary afterward.

The Burgfest tasting essentially strips the fermented grape juice of history, grower, reputation and status, something rarely undertaken in Burgundy, especially now that some of these bottles achieve four-figure price tags. It unfailingly springs surprises and throws curveballs. Illustrious growers may perform less well than expected. A Bienvenue might come across unwelcoming, a Les Amoureuses too salacious; a Les Charmes might not live up to its name. Winemaking faults can be brutally exposed when wines are adjudged against their peers. There will always be wines that ridicule your assessment from barrel, scores that embarrass and leave you perplexed. Did you completely misread that wine in barrel or did it simply change in the intervening period? Usually, it is a bit of both. Burgundy is a cat.

The 2015 vintage was acclaimed upon release, fortunately not meteorologically but verbally this time, so collective expectations were high coming into this tasting, especially for the fêted reds. For growers who had suffered a miasma of hail, frost and depleted harvests since 2010, the dry 2015 growing season came as a godsend. A rapid, even flowering portended an early picking; warm, dry weather prevailed throughout July; and temperatures were one or two degrees Celsius above average but without the heat spikes that discombobulated the 2003 vintage. Growers had to be wary of oidium affecting older vines, although that was relatively easy to remedy. Showers on August 12 and 13 staved off hydric stress and particularly benefited vines rooted in clayey soils. But when it came time to unsheath the pruning shears, some growers found that the vines had not achieved phenolic ripeness and opted to wait. Even before the harvest finished under idyllic blue skies, optimism for a great vintage was high. A few months later, allocations were snapped up by enthusiastic Burgundy lovers, despite concern about increasing prices and apparent insatiable demand, especially from East Asia.

With the beginning of the new year, winemakers’ sentiments toward the 2015 vintage seemed to shift in tone. Privately, they began to downplay the hype that surrounded the wines’ release, expressing preferences for the 2014s that purportedly translated terroir with greater clarity than the riper, richer, more fruit-driven 2015s. I was intrigued to find out whether those winemakers had grounds for backtracking, or whether consumers lucky enough to cellar a few cases are currently sitting on a benchmark vintage destined to become the high point of the decade.

The Wines

This tasting provides so much information, so many talking points, that I could go on ad nauseum examining the performance of each and every grower. Allow me to begin by stating something perhaps controversial but irrefutable. On paper, Burgfest is an examination of terroir, since flights are organized by vineyard. The mantra is that great wine is made in the vineyard, a priori, vineyard site is the determining factor. If only that romantic idea were true. If Burgfest proves one thing, year after year, it is that winemakers’ decisions throughout the entire process, from bud-break to bottling, tend to override the sway of terroir. How you prune, whether you de-leaf, whether you farm biodynamically or with chemicals, when you decide to pick, how much you sort the fruit, add stems or de-stem, chaptalize or acidify, how much new oak you elect to use. Sorry to bust the myth, but these multiple decisions shape the wine to a greater degree than whether this vineyard has a bit more limestone than that one. The juxtaposition of these wines at Burgfest reveals so much about decisions made by the winemaker because Burgundies are more sensitive than Bordeaux. Sometimes varicolored flights suggested the wines came from different countries, let alone exactly the same vineyard. See the evidence below. These are the five Clos Saint-Jacques, same walled vineyard and same vintage, all adjacent to each other.