Any purple pager interested in burgundy will have noticed the trend highlighted by David Schildknecht in our recent video interview with him midway through his stint in Burgundy reviewing the 2006s. It sometimes seems as though every Burgundy producer has started his or her own négociant business, bottling fruit grown by other people.
This follows a modern trend started by the likes of Etienne Sauzet, for example, so that some wines may be called Domaine X while others are sold under the négociant name of, say, X Père et Fils. As Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey pointed out here, it is not necessarily the case that the wines made from his own fruit are better than those made from fruit grown on the right site by someone else.
All of which poses a terrible problem for those of us who care about correct naming of wines. You can imagine how difficult it can be to sort out exactly which wines are, strictly speaking, domaine bottled – ie made from fruit grown by the person who made the wine – and which are made from others' fruit. Especially in a dark cellar full of apparently identical barrels.
But we are currently in the throes of tidying up our producer names to continue to improve our tasting notes search and make its counterpart on our new site, currently being built, even better. Julia and Melanie Jones have already invested a considerable amount of time in this very tedious rationalisation process.
But the question is, how important is it to you that we retain the distinction between domaine bottled wines and the rest?
It is probably worth pointing out that not all producers do. They simply use the same producer name for all their wines, regardless of whether the fruit was grown on land belonging to them, rented by them or by others in one of Burgundy's many rich variants. And the phenomenon is not limited to Burgundy.
I have been discussing this with colleagues such as Michel Bettane and Bruce Sanderson of The Wine Spectator who also write about burgundy. All are agreed it's a problem to achieve the sort of 100% accuracy we all strive for. We would much appreciate your comments and suggestions below.
