The last bottles while harvesting and this weekend’s modest triplet, dovetailed together…

2023 Matrot, Meursault
This domaine has slipped from my list of visits – I suppose mainly because the wines were always ‘okay’ but not more – but this is a lovely wine. One with impact, good concentration and delicious flavour – the bottle was emptied very quickly.
Rebuy – Yes

1999 Grivot, Richebourg
Far from ready 10 years ago, I decided that it was time to revisit. It was served too cold so needed lots of time in the glass – indeed it would have been a different wine if opened 4-5 hours before consuming and with better temperature management. In recent years the 96 was wonderful, the 97 not and the 98 was somewhere in-between.
Still deeply coloured. I’ve chilled this too much, so it’s going to need time in the glass. Clean, deep, muscular aromas. Slowly some semblance of flowers – clean, nothing ultra-pretty yet, despite the age. Growing in the mouth, a velour texture with the tannic dryness of youth almost gone. Very long with an aniseed accent a holding very long and wide. Drinkable, powerful wine today, but such a baby – wait 5 more years in the cellar and/or 2-3 more hours in the glass!
Rebuy – Maybe but probably only for the label! Even that’s a stretch at the old price of 295 Swiss francs in 2001 !!

And a red to follow?

2015 des Croix, Beaune
‘Only’ a villages wine, but in terms of drinkability and enjoyment, easily better than the Grivot today…
Lots of (younger) colour. Airy, but still with some more structural suggestion to these aromas. Cool, more direct, classy texture, ripe but pretty and detailed fruit. For a 2015 this is not so dark or spiced and it’s clearly the more delicious and detailed and more texturally impressive wine over lunch!
Rebuy – Yes

And at home in the last days:

2023 Gérard Tremblay, Chablis 1er Montmain
From Montmain proper
Hmm, a mineral-saline style of nose, slightly round in shape but with clarity too. Mouth-filling fruit with plenty of juicy energy. This is a wine that’s far too easy to drink

2021 Henri Gouges, Nuits St.Georges 1er La Richemone
A Maison wine, a cru that’s generally hard to find, and almost always a treat.
Coolness, but depth to this attractive nose. Mouth-filling. Like the nose, here is impressive depth of flavour and a whooshing width of mouth-watering flavour energy. Not the most luxurious of texture but a wine that keeps begging me to take another sip. Clearly, well behind the wine of Perrot-Minot (for example), but also priced much more accessibly. I’m enjoying it very much – not only that, it drank perfectly over 3 days !!
Rebuy – Yes

And the house crémant is always good 😉

Just noting for my own memory:

This was a label at the domaine until 2018 – but the domaine never had ‘regional’ parcels of vines, this was actually a blend of some Beaune, some Savigny and until the parcel was sold late in 2008, a little Pommard too.

The 2005 was one of the last in my cellar – it’s still dark coloured and powerful – atypical Bourgogne for sure. The aromas and flavours are now accented with quite an obvious oaky note – unlike the lighter but easier 2006 which I would prefer to drink today. I’ve never noted such overt oak in the 2005 before, and I’m onto my last bottle or two from a case of 12 !!

These days, at the right addresses, there is so much fun to be had with ‘simple’ Bourgogne !!

Our day started with St.Romain – a parcel of older vines plus a parcel of young, 5-year-old vines. No getting the hands dirty here – triage was not needed for either parcel. The grapes looked super – with virtually no dry grapes – and the pressed juice came out with a pH of 3.30, lower even than the domaine’s Corton-Charlemagne – got to be happy with that in a hot vintage such as 2026 !!

Next into the cuverie was some Beaune villages from the climat of Point des Tuvillains. Seemingly the lowest amount of dry grapes to be removed – or at least on a par with the Corton Vigne aux Saint. The grapes looked great but given that today had temperatures of 30°C and saw the return of the sun, these grapes little warm, so will overnight in the chiller for sorting tomorrow.

So not much sorting today – but there was lunch to eat and wine to drink – the learning never stops 🙂

There remain parcels of Aloxe-Corton and Beaune Bressandes – but probably they will be harvested on Saturday as there’s some heavy rain forecast for Thursday evening and into Friday…

Beaune Villages

Young vine St.Romain

Lunch

Old vine St.Romain

So, the rain that came yesterday evening, turned out to be quite heavy for a time. It’s only five millimetres overnight, but that five millimetres is more than they’ve had for quite some time!

This morning, just like yesterday, it’s 17° but feels cooler due to a little breeze. Some of the villages were partially hidden by a fine mist, almost foggy. The rain provided a little humidity that everyone would have preferred to see a week or two earlier, but most of the vignerons are really happy, and they consider it’s going to ‘relax’ any unpicked grapes.

Today at the home domain, we started with the grand cru – and what beautiful grapes!

This was Corton Vigne aux Saint. Not the dryness of all the grapes that I triaged yesterday, but once again, beautifully shaped small bunches. The overnight rain managed to reawaken some wildlife in the cases of grapes – an occasional spider, one stinkbug, maybe a few ants and a few ladybugs too. So compared to only three ladybugs and one grasshopper yesterday, life has returned to the vines 🙂

The Corton was treated to about two-thirds whole bunch, and the rest was de-stemmed. We then moved on to Beaune 1er cru Les Pertuisots. The grapes not as optically beautiful as the Corton, but still very good – again about two-thirds whole bunch and the rest de-stemmed.

Lunch came part-way through processing the Pertuisots – and we drank wine 😉

Post-lunch, the rest of the Pertuisots before finishing the day with more Beaune 1er cru – this time from Tuvillains. Consistently good grapes – each of the crus we triaged today with a small extra amount of dried grapes, but all showed less of this than Monday’s grapes.

The boss is hoping for at least 20hl/ha from today’s crus. Like yesterday, nice pure flavours and nothing negative to report, only the consistently low volumes…

Perhaps a little white tomorrow(?)

Away from the home domaine – but still close in the Côte de Beaune – the Hospices de Beaune finished their harvest today, whereas Thomas Bouley is about to start! Occasional domaines are finishing in the Côte de Nuits too, but most ‘in the north’ are about mid-harvest. Did I mention the north? More and more Chablis domaines are starting to harvest – almost none have finished at this stage…

To be continued…

Today’s pics:

Corton Vigne aux Saint

De-stemmed Corton…

BOB! Our Blanchefleurs from Monday

Beaune 1er Pertuisots

Lunch !!

Beaune 1er Tuvillains

It was a cool start in Beaune today, 17 degrees at nine in the morning – in the context of August 2026 that’s as cool as it gets, and with a little bit of a breeze too – order was restored in the afternoon with 31°C 🙂

At 09h00 this morning, the picking team of this year’s home domaine were obviously out in the vines, but their start wasn’t too early today, they start at just 08h30. The casual starting time reflects this year’s modest harvest volumes – usually 50-70% lower yields for the reds, better for whites but still often not more than 50% again – in 2026 it’s all about the lack of juice. More on that later.

It’s the northern part of Beaune that we’re harvesting today, plus a small parcel in Savigny-lès-Beaune too – villages. It won’t be a long day…

Our first grapes are from Beaune 1er cru Cent-Vignes.

We are harvesting and sorting 4 different parcels – two on high, and two that are lower. The lower parcels are on a more alluvial soil that drains too well for this vintage – the higher, usually more draining parcels on the slope have fared little better due to their excellent drainage – no advantage here in 2026, so due to the hydric stress, it’s one of the most affected areas with lots of vine leaves turning yellow. The grapes, however, look not bad at all. In fact, there are plenty of grapes – it’s just that I’ve never seen such consistently small bunches. With our chosen approaches for sorting, there’s not that much triage to be done; in fact, I’ve rarely seen such minimal intervention during triage – but there’s so very little juice.

This year, the case collecting the ‘trie’ under our vibrating table doesn’t collect very much, and what it does collect is bone-dry – something that I’ve never seen before.

We’re making a mixture of whole cluster and fully de-stemmed – the whole clusters in the bottom of the fermentation tank, which were then covered by the de-stemmed grapes. The whole bunches/clusters are self-explanatory, but we used a special sorting machine, the Mistral, to further sort the de-stemmed grapes. I last used a Mistral during the 2013 vintage; it uses compressed air to blow away the sub-optimal (different density) grapes. In the circumstances of 2026, it worked very well; the ‘Mistral triage’ was around 90% dried, hard grapes. And the other 10% of good grapes that we lost? The boss observed mordantly, “At this stage, if you’re talking about the difference between 15 and 13 hectolitres per hectare, who cares, provided it’s been well triaged!”

Lunch had some lovely Champagne, Chablis and red Chassagne.

During our afternoon session, we finished the Cent-Vignes, then had a small Savigny-interlude – it’s not a big parcel. These were the largest clusters of the day, with more juice than the Beaunes, but versus a typical vintage, the clusters were still below average size. Not much to triage again, and kept as whole bunches.

Our last parcel was from young (5-years-old) vine Beaune (villages) Blanchefleurs. Just the second vintage here and the domaine’s own massale selection. Such tiny, but beautifully presented clusters of pinot – fit for La Tâche rather than Beaune! This small parcel was placed into a ceramic Klever, with some foulage (pressing of the grapes) and then sealed for a carbonic maceration. It will be fun to see how that turns out.

By 5pm, there’s only the clean-up that’s left for today. There was one novelty though, around 19h00 came thunder and lightning – oh, and by 19h30 there was plenty of rain too !!

Day 1 learnings:
Very small grapes rather than a lack of grapes are defining the vintage volume here.
Impressively dry on the triage tables – very little lost juice – probably just because there is so little juice.
Almost no fauna was found in the triage – the world of insects had to find different places for refuge and water this year.
Even the dried/drying grapes showed zero ‘off-flavours’ – that’s a first for me, since I started to triage in 2004. It’s a shame that I can’t compare to 2003…
The pinot-fruit is ripe-flavoured but pure; I see no prune or overdone flavours at this early stage

To be continued…

Today’s pics:

Baby bunches

One side good – the other (sunny) side dry…

Carbon dioxide …

Pinot through the CO2 mist…

De-stemmed on top…

Lunch !!

Tool of the day…

Looks like sorting by Hoka…

Trie – as dry as can be…

Arty giraffe !!

“Why prefacing – it’s almost done isn’t it?”

Not at all, the harvest is not yet halfway through – and I only start my harvest on Monday – in the Côte de Beaune. Those reports will come daily, but unfortunately not in the old, inimitable style of sadly missed Marko de Morey…

1976 Tollot-Beaut, Aloxe-Corton
But to kick things off, why not a nice bottle of 1976? A fifty-year-old vintage but one with (dryness) parallels to 2026… Of course, this cork breaks, but the pieces come out easily.
Plenty of colour. This nose has some sweetness of fruit but also a hint of balsamic, almost Madeira – every cork will be different – this one came out too easily; the last cork from one of these 1976s (I started with 12 about 20 years ago) was more like concrete! Flavours of Madeira are not uncommon in older wines, and this still tasted sweetly delicious with a nice mouth-watering energy. Ripe fruit, a hint of caramel too. I enjoyed two ample-sized glasses. The wine wasn’t as good on day two – but on day 1, it was a lovely wine for its age…
Rebuy – No Chance!

The earliest vintage for 500 years, cry the headlines
Well yes, but one could just as easily say the earliest recorded harvest, rather than trying to quantify the unquantifiable…

So, as the headlines dissect the regions in the form of ‘the earliest crémant harvest‘ (etcetera), like everything else Burgundian, if we make the definitive statement that it’s the earliest ever, for everything, we are guaranteed to be 95% correct 🙂

Storms hit the Côte d’Or on the 15th and 18th July – Marsannay (& Dijon) being badly hit by the hail – potentially losing 60% of their crop – but the volume is a moving target – losing 60% of what? It already looked like half a harvest before the hail…

The relative drought and very high temperatures in August actually delayed the harvest. Many growers were anticipating picking pinots mid-month, but the maturation slowed due to some blockage – so it’s still a record early harvest despite many domaines postponing their harvest by a week!

It seems that, this year, Benoit Ente has taken the trophy for fastest out of the starting blocks, even ahead of most of the crémant harvests; having harvested at almost 13% potential alcohol his Puligny-Montrachet 1er (Folatières) En la Richarde on Saturday 8th August – and clearly the last of his vines have been harvested for a few days now. Returning for a second to crémant harvests, I understand that a few of the most quality-minded producers have (here and there) rejected lots of grapes this year for having too much potential alcohol – the limit should be 11.5°…

Mid last week (12-13 August) amongst the (mainly chardonnay) pickers there were even some brave souls picking reds – mainly from parcels of younger vines in the Côte de Beaune, but including by important domaines from the Côte de Nuits.

Monday the 17th August brought a welcome 20mm of rain to Gevrey-Chambertin, but only 1mm to Beaune.

The flow of pickers into the reds remains quite modest, so far, though I watched a small team from Comte Georges de Vogüé picking in the higher (Grands) Musigny section on Tuesday this week – the 18th August – even if these are young vines, that’s surely yet another record.

The same day (Tuesday morning), close to the cross of Charlemagne, teams (vans!) from DRC, des Croix and (PY) Colin-Morey jostled for position as all were picking at the same time – in this area, Louis Latour had already picked. Yields here were not to bad considering the vintage – like the reds, there are enough grapes but with not much juice in those grapes. So maybe half a harvest – my contact indicated about 26 hl/ha in the Charlemagne – and more like losses of ‘only’ 30-40% in the pinots. It’s harder to generalise with the pinots – some plots look great, in other areas the veraison remains incomplete – some bunches still have both green grapes and shrivelled grapes on the same stem.

Rain was forecast for Monday 24th August, and many domaines preferred to wait for that and start on Tuesday – but like the rest of this summer, rain was often forecast but never arrived. It’s starting to look just the same for Monday…