2012 Côte-Rôtie

In Bernard Burgaud's opinion 2013 has turned out to be "a nice, agreeable vintage, but some wines have slightly dry tannins that should soften up with a few years of bottle age." He noted that he has no complaints about his yields in 2013 and 2012, both of which gave him "about 35 hectoliters per hectare, which is good because 2014 only gave 20." Burgaud thinks that 2012 will turn out to be "a classic year, but not in the sense of 2010, which is brilliant and too good to be called classic."

Burgaud told me that he prefers his 2011 Cote-Rotie to his 2012 and that he also favors his 2010 over his 2009. "The '12 and '09 have richness and power but the '11 and '10 are wines of finesse, which is more my style," he said. He finds the '12s opulent and expressive "but maybe missing some of the classic elegance of Cote-Rotie," a character that he finds in spades with the earlier vintage. Two thousand eleven gave Burgaud "a healthy yield and lots of time to pick," which also gave his workers the freedom to make careful, unhurried selections in the vineyards. Burgaud believes that the key to success in the '11 vintage was whether you picked before or after the rain, "because acid levels didn't drop precipitously after the storms but sugar levels continued to rise." That said, he thinks that 2011, overall, will probably be discounted by the market, figuratively as well as literally, because "you can't follow vintages like 2009 and 2010 without people being overly critical. There's no ability to accept three really good vintages in a row."