I appreciate the insight into the world of Burgundy provided in the Essa FB post.
Also appreciate WK’s take on it.
Tue Jan 08, 2019 8:14 pm
And you have very extreme winemaking going on in the Côte de Beaune to pursue this tangier, leaner, more minimalist style: one darling of this board picked his 2018s at around 11-11.5% potential alcohol and chaptalized to 12.5%.
“Natural” wine. Shows the terroir better.
As to the article, I know a lot of people who call themselves acid freaks. Not that they have particularly good taste, but acidity is an easy thing to spot and claim to prefer.
However, there is often an assumption that some extreme cases represent some kind of a “pendulum” rather than exploration by a few individuals. Just like every Cab in California isn’t 15.9% alcohol, I’d be surprised if the majority of whites in Burgundy were under ripe.
And besides, as a counter approach, we have the trendy orange wines.
Not to quibble, but the average Cabernet Sauvignon brix according to the harvest crush report in the 2013 Napa vintage was 26.3 - which by most conversions gives an alcohol level in the mid-15%. Haven’t got the data to hand but 2014 and 2015 were similar as I recall.
I tasted many white Burgundies over the last years I found exhausting. I asked myself why and had the idea that 3 things may play a role. 1. Premox. 2. Climate change. 3. Trend to lower alc. In fear to produce hedonistic and short living wines producer may think its better to go in the opposite direction. And went too far.
Whatever the reasons had been – the results were not convincing to me. Wines with little charm, reduced, even harsh sometimes. Barely recognizable as Chardonnay any more. In fact with little character and soul. Freshness to an extreme.
__Jeez, I have a somewhat different take on all this. Pity to poor winemakers! The Burgundian’s get savaged in the press and on places like WB for having failure of their white wines from premox. Perhaps they tried to compete in the 90’s with massive California chardonnays that promised richness and hedonism today not in 20 years (ala Kistler and others in mid nineties). Remember those glowing Parker reviews of those Cali wines comparing them to Grand Cru white Burgs?
So white wine makers start to chase more ripeness, more extraction, more batonnage, to fatten the wine up, more glossy new oak, and surprise…they started to fall apart after a few years. (As do most of the old style Kistler whites, I have lots of evidence from my own cellar)
So now with the hue and cry there is a movement to correct the problems, experiment with earlier harvests and other techniques to freshen the wines, and they are getting slammed again! It seems like this is a no win scenario.
Place this against the background of a different culture in drinking (how many millennial neophyte wine drinkers can afford to pay student loans, much less a wine cellar!!) and of course earlier accessibility is going to be a trend. The only exceptions seem to be the collectors who long for the good old days of 20 year aging white Burgundies of their grandfathers. I for one doubt the trends will be going back, it is a new world and there are new desires. The Red Burg producers have gotten it figured out (largely, at least they have had colossal success in selling their product) but the experimentation with chardonnay is ongoing. Vive la experiments!!!
(unless of course someone starts producing Roulot at prices I can afford) 
Boy, I must admit I find this thread hard to analyze. “Many producers”, “board favorite” and on and on and on. There are hundreds or thousands of white Burgundy producers. Of these, I probably buy wines from a dozen or so. Without more specifics as to the names of the producers that do or do not do the things criticized in this thread I must admit that I find this thread pretty useless.
Names, please?
You mean not everyone is making wine like unnamed Poster Child #1?
I caved and decided to go to the Paulee Grand Tasting to taste 2016s. It will be interesting to taste across many producers in a short span (albeit clearly not the best setting for introspection and focus on each wine) to get a better snapshot. Limited as the snapshot will be as you fairly note.
I understand your frustration, but from my point of view, it’s more interesting to keep the discussion general. Naming producers will make things polemical, and I am not looking to berate producers for making failing to make wines how I would make them on this forum. But I think enough of the contributors to this thread taste widely enough for the discussion to be at least moderately interesting. And I think you taste more than widely enough, Howard, to have noticed that contemporary white Burgundy is tangier, more incisive and less textural that it was fifteen years ago, despite vintages being generally warmer.
The idea of this thread definitely isn’t to savage anyone!
To my mind, the changes have more to do with aesthetic choices than the attempt to prevent premox. Sure, some producers attempted to use reduction to protect their wines from oxidation. But this is more about consciously privileging “freshness” and “minerality” over texture and volume. The caricature wines of the 1990s that you describe provoked a stylistic reaction. Has it gone to far? Personally, my ideal is to have my cake and eat it: amplitude with tension; texture and cut. But that’s not easy to find.
We also appear to have accepted the RVF piece’s premise that tight-knit, reduced wines drink better young than old, which I am not sure is correct.
To add a bit of material to the discussion, it’s interesting that producers such as Lamy and Raphaël Coche are thinking quite explicitly about the role of dry extract in their wines. Coche’s view, and Olivier’s if I have rightly understood it, is that dry extract can bring a different kind of freshness to the wine—much as stems can bring perceptible freshness to high pH reds—and that it can help structure the wines. So Coche is trying to use dry extract to do for his wines what reduction and acid did for the colder vintages of the 1990s. This only works with very good grapes and involves work at the crusher and the press. But Coche’s 2015s are very persuasive indeed, and Lamy’s 2017s—which have much more evident quasi-phenolic dry extract than any vintage I tasted from him before—are also pretty special wines. It will be interesting to see where this trend, if it can be called that, goes.
William,
Can you educate us on dry extract in white wines - or is this referring to their red wines? My understanding would the that ‘dry extract’ is phenolics/tannnins but this may not the case. Thanks in advance for the clarification - and for the input here.
Cheers.
I don’t believe that I taste that widely. I tend to drink a relative handful of producers that I like. Sure, I get to taste wines from others, but my friends and I tend to buy wines from similar producers. Most of the white Burgundies (not including Chablis) I have bought in the last several years have been from Ramonet, Dublere, PYCM and his wife, Bernard Moreau, Bouchard, Drouhin and, very recently, Heitz Lochardet (wines just coming in, tasted there this summer but otherwise have limited experience with them). I love white Burgs, but I drink a lot more (quantity and variety of producers) in red Burgs. So, it is really hard to tell anything from this thread without producer names, at least for me.
Dublere wines, to me, are in a more understated style, but I find that true of his reds as well and like their elegance and value. I don’t see much change in the style of his wines in the 8-10 years or so I have been buying from. Certainly, I think the wines of Ramonet, Moreau, Bouchard and Drouhin are very much rich enough for me. I have enjoyed the wines I have had from PYCM but a lot of the ones I have had are too young to make much of a judgment on and I certainly cannot compare these wines to wines made 15 years ago unless I go back to Marc Colin wines (which seem to me to be very different wines). I did have a 2008 from him Thursday night and certainly richness was not an issue with that wine. So, I am having a lot of problems deciding whether I think newer trends are an issue or a good thing or a bad thing. If, for example, the article is saying that the 2014 CM Morgeots from Ramonet, Moreau or Drouhin or 2014 Meursault Perrieres from Bouchard are made in a new style that is different from older styles, I would say bring on more of the new style. Very hard to analyze the article in a vacuum.
Yes that’s why I said CA, but even so, there are plenty of factors right? In other words, it’s not a linear relationship between brix and alcohol. Factors such as the yeast, the temperature, the pH, various enzymes, and other things affect the conversion of glucose to alcohol. Here’s an article on that issue:
“The highest average ever for either county was Napa’s 2013=26.3 brix (14.7%)”
Don’t want to derail the thread though - that discussion can be another thread some time.
And as you know far more than I about Burgundy, I do have a question and he touched on it in the article - if they’re indeed harvesting earlier, does that necessarily imply more chaptalization? In other words, are the alcohol levels on white Burgundy declining with supposed earlier picking, or are they consistent with past years?
In short, yes.
Until recently, chaptalization was systematic, including at the best addresses. Jean-François Coche used to do it pretty much every year.
Now, attaining the necessary sugar is much less of an issue (2013 was probably the only vintage this decade were it was needed). But people sometimes feel obliged to pick on acidity, which can leave them with too little sugar, so they chaptalize to make up the difference. This will depend on site, rootstocks, yields, pruning and all sorts of factors. Arnaud Ente often has to chaptalize his Puligny Champ Gain, IIRC, because it tends to lose acid before it has as much sugar as he would like.
I have also heard that chaptalizing late, in barrel, is also a way to encourage the kind of reductive aromas that have been so popular in the last decade.
Alcohol is going to vary on a producer by producer basis but I would say that for folks like Ente and PYCM coming in at 12-12.5% finished alcohol, those numbers are lower than the average either today or ten years ago, and considerably lower than the numbers for the wines they made at the beginning of their careers too.
That’s the term that the French use for extract from grape skins in (in this context) white wine. Seems they use the term more than US winemakers. So people are doing more crushing and modifying their press cycles to get more of it.
Hello William, Good morning to the speakers of this discussion, I rise here because my text of September 7 was quoted in your debate. initially he did not name any producer and does not seek to do so. it is a simple observation related to observed practices that denature the wines. We are not talking here about wine styles, but about abusive formatting designed to position winemaking and wine aging above the character conferred by the terroir and above all serious oenological faults that lead our appellations onto a worrying path.
The appellations for which we are responsible are all inscribed since immemorial times inscribed in a cultural framework. If they have the duty to evolve, it is out of the question that some producers can transform them to the point that they no longer represent the character of the vintage they are deprived of, and worse, that they are so influenced by oenological choices and interventions. that they lose all their identity.
sweetening, yeasting, acidifying, reducing with artifices of makers etc … are only initial failures related to crops unbalanced by cultural and harvesting choices that do not meet the requirements of the vintages that we must produce.
Happy New Year to all.
Patrick Essa - Domaine Buisson-Charles
Perhaps a bit tangential to the topic, but I found the highlighted part a bit weird. To my understanding, producers usually avoid using stems in high pH reds, because stems contain potassium and thus they boost pH even higher. Since high pH is normally detrimental to the stability of the wine, it would make sense not to push high pH any higher.
From my understanding, a producer might use stems in a wine to introduce some sappy freshness in a wine with both low acidity and low pH (as pH and acidity don’t necessarily walk hand-in-hand) as the wine can thus survive higher pH. However, normally I’ve heard producers using a higher amount of stems when the wines are low in pH and high in acidity just to soften the wines down a bit. AFAIK, this is also the reason why many of the producers in Burgundy have preferred to include the stems in their reds.
However, since there are several winemakers here on this board, I’d love to hear some further input to the matter from them!
The key word was “perceptible”. Even though stems precipitate out tartaric acid and raise the pH, they can create the perception of freshness in the wine. In Burgundy, some producers like to use them more abundantly in warm vintages for that reason, despite the higher pHs that ensue.
Thanks for contributing, Patrick. I am sympathetic to your argument that grapes harvested too early and adjusted in the winery will never fully express their appellations. And I can imagine how frustrating it is when you feel that wines are pre-judged by journalists in function of the date of harvest. I appreciate that you feel very strongly about this important question, and it is brave of you to address it so directly. But I think that when you called colleagues who picked in August the “new phylloxera” and imputed not only that they would necessarily need to chaptalize and adjust their musts, but that their goal was to have higher yields (if I have understood your French text correctly), your text became polemical. I have seen must analyses for grapes picked in August last year that have more than 12.5% potential alcohol, as well as very healthy pH and TA. And while some producers may be unscrupulous, there are dedicated and experienced vignerons who picked early, in good faith, because they thought it would make better wines. Even if we happen to disagree with the philosophy or its results, we mustn’t disparage their motives.
Wise words!