I am still tidying up my notes on extensive tastings of the 2004 burgundies and will publish my overview of this interesting and highly variable vintage in wine news and the Financial Times together with full tasting notes plus ratings and suggested drinking dates this Saturday 04 feb in purple pages.
This is just to let you know that although I was fully aware of the onslaught at the time of tasting, mainly earlier last month in London backed up by a bit of tasting in Burgundy in nov 04, I was absolutely amazed to find that once all the tasting notes had been amalgamated there were almost 1,000 of them! This represents many wines that were tasted several times over a short period so I will be presenting a as full a picture of each wine as I can.
Since the Burgundy primeur tasting calendar was more ridiculously concentrated than ever this year, I was particularly grateful for my new assistant Julia Harding MW who was able to provide back-up tasting. She has done a great job and written some fine notes. In those cases where we both tasted the same wines I have been able to check that we seem to have very similar perceptions and opinions. In cases in which only Julia tasted a particular wine, her note will be suffixed ‘(JH)’ so that you know exactly whose palate was responsible.
Since there are more burgundy notes than ever before, I shall be publishing them in several different shorter articles divided alphabetically by the name of the producer – as I did for my 2003 Burgundy tasting notes.
I do hope you will find these tasting notes useful. I’m sorry that because there are so many of them, all of which had to be transcribed from our handwriting, edited and ordered, that I couldn’t publish them before now, even though many UK merchants sent out their offers two or three weeks ago. In recognition of the fact that some of the rarer wines disappear fast, I published three lists of my favourite small-production Grands Crus and the like in purple pages almost as soon as I tasted them. See
