Herding Cats: Burgfest 2020 – The Reds

BY NEAL MARTIN | OCTOBER 30, 2024

Burgundy covets caprice. Tasters, critics and even winemakers can only approximate how its wines evolve. Predicting Burgundy is like herding cats–it’s just a more enjoyable undertaking with less meowing.

This article focuses on the 2020 Pinot Noir Premier and Grand Crus of the Côte d’Or: some 250-odd wines all appraised blind within their peer groups, an exercise that lends itself to highlighting virtues and shortcomings. Minor faults are mercilessly exposed, while the most successful wines reign victorious. Not so many moons ago, scores were fixed for the banal reason of communication via ink on paper in all its immutable glory. The Internet invites alteration. Critiquing becomes more like a rolling review, signposting a wine’s evolution, recording consistencies and quirks alike. Accordingly, the raison d’être of a tasting like Burgfest is not to validate prior judgments but to prove a taster’s prowess in their miraculous nailing of every unfinished wine from the barrel. Rather, it is an invaluable opportunity to monitor changes or inconsistencies. Moreover, it is a chance to self-assess my own palate.

This edition saw an unprecedented number of deviating scores and “?” - wines deemed unrepresentative. Thankfully, a majority did fall within my original banded score, so there is no need to give up the day job just yet. However, to reflect the reality that Burgundy evolves to varying degrees of (un)predictability and can differ enormously between one bottle and another. It can suffer off-days due to extraneous factors such as barometric pressure or a waxing gibbous moon. Scores are obliged to diverge. They live in parallel to my scores from barrel, impressions taken in a different context, at a different time.

It begs questions…

What happened in the interim?

Is it a unique aberration?

Or is there a common cause that can be observed in other bottles?