The Glorious 1999 Red Burgundies

BY STEPHEN TANZER | MARCH 13, 2018

From the outset, the 1999 red Burgundies offered a rare combination of charm and power. Most of the better wines were balanced and alluring from the start, but they are evolving very slowly and still have plenty of life ahead of them. While many of the ‘99s I sampled with the producers this winter in the course of my tastings of ‘16s and ‘15s have gone through sullen stages in bottle, most of them have launched into their periods of peak drinkability. If you own these wines – and especially if you chose wisely at the outset – you will be amply rewarded. One caveat: proper storage is everything, especially consistently cool temperatures and adequate humidity to protect corks from drying out. If your cellar reaches the upper 60s during the warmest time of the year, your bottles should still enjoy a “natural” aging curve but they will evolve considerably more quickly than those in a colder cellar where temperatures remain in the mid to upper 50s. (Of course, the wines I tasted in Burgundy had the added advantage of never having been subjected to the vagaries of shipping.) 

A Brief Review of the 1999 Growing Season

Following a cool, rainy early spring, May turned warmer and more consistent, and the flowering took place under excellent conditions in early June. It was clear from the start that 1999 would bring an abundant crop as the number of bunches per vine was huge. There followed a period of cool weather with some storms during the second half of June and into early July, but from mid-July through mid-September the weather was mostly warm and dry, with heat building in late August, causing the grape skins to thicken. Although the conditions from mid-August to mid-September generally set the style for the year – rich, generous and fully ripe – some vines on thin soil or in sites facing south or southwest were affected by heat or drought stress.

Well-timed showers at the end of August and in early September helped revive the ripening process, and drying breezes following the rains prevented rot from taking hold. In many cases the precipitation also swelled the grapes a bit, so that the ultimate size of the crop was often even higher than many growers had anticipated only a few weeks earlier. This was a growing season, needless to say, in which the most conscientious growers took multiple steps to control yields; in fact, when I initially tasted the wines from barrel in late 2000, some estates reported that they had carried out two separate green harvests but still brought in plentiful crop loads.

The Harvest of 1999 and the Making of the Wines

The ban de vendange, or the official start to the harvest set each year by the local wine authorities – and discontinued in Burgundy in 2008 – was September 15 on the Côte de Beaune (September 20 for grand crus) and September 18 for the Côte de Nuits (also September 20 for the grand crus). Harvest dates were important, as there was moderate rainfall on Sunday, September 19, followed by some intermittent nighttime rains early the following week. More substantial rainfall arrived on September 24, after which conditions began to deteriorate. (A few estates on the Côte de Nuits actually used helicopters to dry their fruit on the vines.) Most growers maintained that the grapes remained in reasonably good shape through about the 26th, before beginning to show signs of dilution, loss of acidity and potential alcohol, and rot.

Interestingly, harvest dates in 1999 were nearly identical to those of 2002 (a vintage on which I reported two years ago on Vinous), but the flowering in ’99 was a bit earlier than it had been in ’02, giving the ‘99s up to a full week more hang time than the later growing season. Grape sugars in ‘99 were generally healthy to above average, in a few extreme cases approaching 14%.