I agree and disagree! Hopefully we won’t have these temperatures and the drought every single year and I don’t think that we will, but the overall tendency towards an increase in sunny, hot years over the last two decades is undeniable - and explains the mostly successful vintages in Bordeaux, for example. Apart from 2024, the Loire has had an unbroken run of successful red vintages since 2014, which is unheard of.
I looked at the records again and in 2025, we had 19 days equal to or higher than 30° - so my memory of how exceptionally super-hot it was in 2003 was actually wrong, it was just exceptional at the time.
Even in 2024, which I remember as being cold and wet, we had 12 days of 30° or more, so the same as 2003. So there’s already a clear pattern and I’ve no doubt that in a few more years, I’ll think of 2026 as being sub-par.
It’s important to note that it’s not just temperature, but when during the growing cycle it takes place. Rain is crucial. And the soil types as well as grape varieties. Plus farming for warmer conditions matters. Vine age counts.
Everything is local. Generalities do not apply. For example in Bordeaux, Pomerol received more rain than St. Emilion this year, and the Right Bank overall received more water than the Left Bank. Those with water retentive soils will produce different, and better wines than those without the ability to retain moisture.
That is inappropriate discussion for this thread. I was specifically talking about the trends that we’ve observed in wine vintages over the past 50 years being mostly positive and two super hot vintages in 23 years doesn’t mean the sky is falling for good vintages continuing to be produced.
Scientists do not “predict all they want” in an arbitrary way. Their predictions are based on their best interpretation of the best data and models available. And there is no question that the overall trend over the past few decades, including (especially) the last 20+ years, is of global warming. I really don’t understand how anyone can insist otherwise when the evidence is staring us in the face.
I’ve crossposted to the Nature Comms paper to which I alluded in my previous post. This paper is a preprint, given early public access because of its relevance. It is a “worst-case” scenario but entirely plausible. We cannot say that we haven’t been warned, and scientists have been warning the public for decades now.
Yes, the following is specific to the current ENSO (El Nino) event, but overall global sea-surface temperatures are higher than ever and we see how that affects things like the number and intensity of hurricanes and the ever increasing incidence of extreme rainfall events, among other phenomena.
Climate change is real. All evidence points to it being anthropogenic by cause. Ignoring this, or worse, downplaying this, does not help anyone. Certainly there is local variation and one can mitigate (or even benefit from) the effects of local weather, but at this point I think it is worse than unhelpful to ignore the evidence. Scientists do not wish this on anyone (most scientists have children themselves!), but their warnings are ignored by too many.
I’m sorry but there have been no real “normal” years in Burgundy this millinia.
They picked in August 6 times in 600 years from 1400-2000. That was the norm.
Now they pick in August more than 1 year in every 3. That is not “normal”, unless it’s the new normal. And this year is overly hot for the “new” normal. That should worry people.
Edit: sorry, that should worry people from a global warming standpoint. I wasn’t referring to wine quality.
Wine quality is always going to be the question, isn’t it? A couple of years ago, reading William Kelley’s vintage reports, I realized that we’re in some ways past the “good vintage/bad vintage” discussion and closer to a discussion of which growers figured out how to deal with whatever crazy combination of heat, hail, rot, locusts and famine got thrown at them.
That was essentially my point. 2003 was super hot and the vintage sucked. This year was super hot and probably will suck similarly. But the “new normal” in Burgundy in the past 20 years has produced such a consistent string of good/great vintages that we never saw 40-50 years ago.
Successful Bordeaux vintages depends upon your preference in wines. I understand there have been no off vintages recently, but I am not looking for 14% abv wines of massiveness. So unsuccessful for myself in that respect.
A lack of challenge in ripening the fruit is not a successful year. In the years I was developing my palate and beliefs in wines, the large majority of good producers used to talk about the best wines coming from vintages where the vines had just the amount of weather for the fruit to get ripe and no more. These new “normal” vintages around the world look more and more like massive Thanksgiving dinners (US holiday of eating too much) and the wines have too much in common with the results of a 10,000 calorie feast.
Not trying to yuck your yum but it’s produced a string of easily understandable, high fruit years that look more like new world wines than they ever used to. I appreciate that the crunchiness that is Burgundy still hangs on in the structural aspects of the wines, and makes a decent number of the wines still distinctly Burgundy. But the new normal seems easier to understand to me, rather than better.
I’ll take 1995 for a $1000 Alex.
What is the best bottle of Rousseau that you have ever had?
You may be correct that the best aren’t better. Only time will tell. But the average success rate certainly seems to have increased. There are some absolutely fabulous red vintages around the 90s - and certainly they are the wines I’d like to be drinking today. 88, 90, 91, 93, 96, 99, 01, 02 are rockstars. 95 isn’t bad either. We’ll see how 15, 16, 17, 19, 22 stack up against them in 25 years or so.
For Rousseau, the 88 and 91 Chambertin have been my favs, but both still could use more time.
I have been whining and crying about the 2018-2020 vintages for Champagne. The wines are not poor by any means but they are heavier and less nervy. But two weeks ago I had the Egly-Ouriet Grand Cru bottling from 2020 base and it was just fantastic. Every bit as good as I always find those wines.
It was both fabulous and puzzling at the same time.
Overall consistency has gone up. But while the lows are not as low as they used to be, to me, the highs are often not as high.
I’ve had good 2015s but they are big. I love 2017 and was really happy with the 2023 Burgs we used for our last Goodfellow and Burgundy comp. That seems a lovely vintage based on the few data points of the tasting. 2019 is probably not for me, but I do get what people really see in those wines.
So, all in all, it seems like the number of really great vintages is about the same, it’s just that the “off” vintages now are appealing, in a ripe way, wines for most consumers.
But I would side with @M1a_U that we aren’t finished warming the planet yet, so the consideration that the “new norm” will stick around for the next six hundred years is unlikely to be true.
The Willamette Valley is buffered by the cooling influence of the cold Pacific Ocean and that is saving our behinds right now (IMO). But if the polar caps actually melt and we don’t have the level of cooling that we currently receive, it will be a problem.
This vintage, in a “super” El Niño, we are having some of the coolest nights I can remember. While everyone is roasting, we’re having a throwback year. That may be short term lucky for us, but it’s quite possible that our nights are cooler this year because of polar melting jumping up this summer and the temporary result is colder than normal water off the coast resulting in colder than normal nights from the maritime winds that we get. Long term that’s not a good trade.
I get that these threads are happy places for Conjecture, but this seems to me a statement that you could pluck out of time, change a few numbers, and have wild Speculation in any of many of the recent generations of Winemaking in Burgundy, i.e. 60 years .
My impression is that opening 1998s in 2008 was a grim business for a lot of producers. And suddenly in the last few years these wines can be very magical/elite.
Michael & I posted notes on 88s/95s recently. I posted another 1995 Dujac note from a Dinner out in Champagne. I’ll link them.
I adored these wines, but I would have zero confidence in saying that well-made wines from a host of vintages from 2007-2019 will not reach those heights. Or haven’t reached those heights already in the cases of the best 07s, 09s, 10s.
With good efforts, thoughtful wine construction, & good farming, most things are possible in Burgundy. I’ve hung out with a lot of Harvest teams these last two years. Whether they show brilliantly at age 8 or age 28 or age 38 is never something that unifies along the lifetimes of these wines/vintages.
People have strong instincts/intuition for conclusions I’m not necessarily in opposition towards. But I certainly remain skeptical/open-minded that none of these conclusions are anything other than Whimsy .
We had two drought years in California in 2021-22, and all the experts proclaimed there were going to be ever-worsening droughts ahead. Each of the winters since then there have been dire predictions about another dry winter forthcoming.
This is not meant as any comment either way about the politics around climate issues, but just to point out that the human mind naturally extrapolates trends from recent data points, but the universe doesn’t generally work that way. 2027 and/or 2028 could be cold and wet in Bordeaux, we will just have to see what happens.
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