Burgundy 2020 – a guide to our coverage

Team JR

Wednesday 22 December 2021 • 3 min read

Burgundy Burgundy 2020

Measuring grape ripeness at Lebreuil in Burgundy

Image of measuring the sugar level in grape must in Burgundy (high in 2020) by Jon Wyand.

27 January 2022 We continue to add links to new collections of tasting notes below but please note that a new group of them has just been added to the Montrachet tasting article published at the beginning of this week. Andy returned there recently...

17 January 2022 Burgundy-phobes, beware. We've just started a series of tasting articles based on the 2020s we have tasted in London to supplement what has gone before. It will continue into next week. Super-speedy uploading has been the order of the day so please forgive, and point out, any glitches.

13 January 2022 Well, we're supposed to be in the thick of London's Burgundy Week and usually at this time of year I would be complaining about how ridiculously many tastings had been arranged for the same day. Not this year. I know of at least five major 2020 burgundy tastings that were cancelled because of a combination of fear of Omicron and the difficulty of shipping samples from France to Brexitland. And there are none of the minor tastings that have tended to cluster around Burgundy Week.

The upshot has been that Andy Howard MW and I have so far been to six tastings. I'm planning to go to another couple on Monday (before the annual Southwold bordeaux tastings take over my diary), Ali Cooper MW will go to one on Tuesday and Julia another on Wednesday.

We thought this year we would group our tasting notes by the merchant hosting the tasting so, for example, one of the first set of tasting notes we will publish will be those I took at the Stannary Wine (Flint's retail arm) tasting on Tuesday evening. Other tasting articles in the pipeline will record our impressions of tastings hosted by Goedhuis, Montrachet, Justerini & Brooks, Liberty, Thorman Hunt, Haynes Hanson & Clark, Vindependents, Robert Rolls and Davy's. We also have a group of reviews of Bellene, Tawse and Guyon 2020s that I took at a tasting laid on at Jeroboams/Laytons' head office. We will try to publish these as soon as we can but you will understand that time is needed to upload and check them.

22 December 2021 Thanks to the wildfire spread of the Omicron variant in London, the burgundy tastings planned as usual for the second week of January are being cancelled left, right and centre. But we will of course be reporting on anything we do manage to taste in London. Fortunately, Matthew Hayes, our man in Dijon, was able to taste far and wide on the Côte d'Or, as he describes today. We plan to publish his overview and tasting notes early next month, along with some others we managed to gather earlier in London.

Contrary to the title of the article we published on 22 September 2020, from barrel this is looking like a remarkably successful vintage across the board, so detailed wine-by-wine commentary is probably less essential than in some other years. With both ripeness and freshness in both colours, it's a buy! And, as in 2019, you don't have to venture up to grand cru level to find satisfaction.

For more detail, see the articles below, listed with the most recently published one at the top. Many a tasting article to come.