2020 Bourgogne Rouge

Benjamin Leroux told me that I should win an award for tasting his entire portfolio –some 53 cuvées – when I visited his winery in Beaune. Well, that's my job; you just have to pace yourself and steadily work your way through without rushing. “We picked from August 20 and nearly everything was harvested within a week," he told me. "The original plan was to begin on August 25. But there was no rain predicted, so there was no reason not to pick sooner. We had the same amount of bunches on the vine, though the reds had a lot of millerandage, so the skin-to-juice ratio was quite high. We had close to 360–370kg per barrel and 320kg for the white. Since 2018, we have used a cold room, so we can preserve the bunches at under 13°C. I had never seen juice with so much color, and therefore we were very gentle with the maceration. I used more whole bunch for the reds to lend freshness, and these days, there is not such an excess of potassium [in the soil], so we can preserve the acidity. I was not expecting the 2020 whites to do so well. I like the ripeness and concentration of the reds, and racking, which we don’t usually do, is helping a lot. All my whites are bottled under Diam, mainly Diam 30, but not all of them, and I use natural cork for the reds." Leroux is always candid in his assessment of the vintage and commented that if he could do the 2020 harvest again, he would have picked some of the vineyard earlier. Most of the whites had been racked, blended and were finishing their aging in foudres.