Burgundy 2021 – guide to our coverage

Jancis Robinson

Wednesday 28 December 2022 • 4 min read

Burgundy Burgundy 2021

2021 tasting line-up at Dom Roulout in Meursault

8 February 2023 Final versions of all the tasting articles listed below have now been published.

26 January 2023 The vast majority of our reviews of 2021 burgundies tasted this month in London have now been published. Over the next week, the work-in-progress articles will be checked and finalised. Some articles might briefly be unavailable while being worked on.

12 January 2023 From today, we are publishing alphabetically organised tasting articles arising from Burgundy Week in London as 'works in progress', as described below.

6 January 2023 A detailed update on how we plan to cover this vintage, so challenging in every way!

We have now published a total of 400 tasting notes on 2021 burgundies, substantially thanks to Matthew's visits to domaines on the Côte d'Or. From Monday 9 January when Burgundy Week starts in London we will be attending as many tastings as possible. It will of course take time to have our hundreds more tasting notes uploaded, edited and sorted into our usual myriad tasting articles grouped alphabetically according to the producers' surnames – and the last burgundy 2021 tasting of which we're aware, Robert Rolls', doesn't take place until 24 January. But in 2021 there was such a small crop that quantities will be extremely limited and in many cases it will be first come, first served.

Aware of this, and some members' desire to put in their orders as soon as possible, those of us attending these tastings plan to post the names of the wines that we particularly recommend in this thread on the Members' forum daily, as soon as is feasible after our day's tasting (probably first thing the morning after). We won't have time to share tasting notes but we hope that some Purple Pagers will find these steers helpful.

We will try to pass our tasting notes to Andrew Morris and his team for uploading as promptly as possible, but the tasting articles, populated over two or three weeks, are likely to be quite a mess initially. So although we will provide links below to the embryonic tasting articles, some of which may be very sparsely populated initially, they won't show up on the home page until they have been tidied up and sorted – although they will appear on the Articles search page as soon as they have any content.

Those who want to keep track of exactly what we have tasted should follow those links, or the Articles search page, but don't expect perfection immediately. Feel free to send suggestions for (reasonable) improvements to this scheme to [email protected]. We will, as usual, do our best.

28 December 2022 All that we have published on this very singular vintage. Above, 2021 samples lined up for Matthew to taste in the atmospheric cellars of Dom Guy Roulot in Meursault.

As Purple Pagers can see on this thread in our Members’ forum, there is considerable interest in the Burgundy vintage that will be the focus of Burgundy Week the week after next in London – even if many wine lovers seem to be wary of both quality and prices.

My generally enthusiastic tasting notes from négociants’ wines shown in London have already been published and we’ll be publishing Matthew’s tasting notes from his visits to 20 domaines on the Côte d’Or next week in three tasting articles to be published on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

The following week we will be busy covering as much ground as possible at this year’s London burgundy tastings. There are fewer than usual because the 2021 crop was so small.

Because there is so little wine to go round, and because of course it will take time to upload our many tasting notes from the Burgundy Week tastings, we thought we would provide something we hope will be helpful this year. We will start a special thread on our Members’ forum called ‘Burgundy 2021 – specific recommendations’, where we plan to add details of wines that stood out for us at the Burgundy Week tasting(s) we attended the previous day. Because we’ll have such a heavy tasting schedule, we won’t have time to provide more than the name of the wine(s) and, we hope, the price and merchant, but at least we can recommend wines we think stand out as early as possible to help with your buying decisions. We will probably ignore the grands crus as these are now so expensive.

Below are the articles published to date and we’ll continue to update this list with the most recently published articles at the top.