2005

Whites

An exceptionally uniform, healthy and evenly ripe white Burgundy crop. Yields were naturally curtailed by small berry size and crop loss during flowering – and further reduced in Chassagne by hail on 17th July. Acidity remained high at harvest (July and August being more dull than hot), with strong residual levels of tartaric acid in the finished wines.

2005 whites display not only aromatic freshness but abundant minerality and with the passage of time are revealing an increasingly strong terroir imprint. The accusation that these wines have more brawn than brain appears frivolous when measured against the reality of Puligny or Meursault’s best. 2005 whites speak clearly of their sites, and their appellation hierarchy appears less compressed than with red Burgundy.

Away from the Côte de Beaune, Chablis and the Mâconnais also turned in robust performances underpinned by good acidity. Chablis, harvesting simultaneously with Beaune, produced bigger-scale wines than usual, showing at least initially more vintage than appellation character. But they have the necessary resources for long-term development. Further south, harvesting often got under way in the Mâconnais before the full benefits of the September sunshine could be reaped. 2005 must nonetheless be counted a good vintage even if it lies somewhat in the shadow of the elegant, accomplished 2006.

However approachable most young 2005s may be, we would still recommend cellaring Côte de Beaune premier cru and grand cru whites and top Chablis for three to five years. All other whites, including delicious Chalonnais and Mâconnais crus, will make a perfect follow-on from the 2004s.

Reds

Few vintages make themselves but 2005 red Burgundy might be a candidate. Nature served up such healthy, balanced raw materials that for once the winemaker, normally the lead player in Burgundy production, was relegated to a walk-on part. Harvest dates, so often a matter of fraught calculation and meteorological uncertainty, could be confidently scheduled in the diary like a dental appointment. Even in serious Côte d’Or domaines, where expensive crop sorting tables had been dutifully wheeled out for the first tractor deliveries of grapes and winery personnel had searched unsuccessfully for anything unripe or rotten to reject, the cry went up ‘on prend tout’ (‘put it all in’). And why not? Yields were naturally moderate, ripeness uniform and laboratory analysis unimprovable.

Quality in this vintage flows from the bottom up, not the top down. Terroir differentiation is fully maintained but the rules of the game were bent, if not changed, in 2005. Most years, the senior wines come out on top because natural advantages of site – drainage, heat retention etc – stand them in better stead through the challenges of a growing season. But in 2005, the relative advantage of better location was reduced. The grand cru’s bag of tricks never needed to be opened. Nature stepped in to even things up, letting Bourgogne rouge sites prone to flooding, underripeness and overproduction enjoy just for once a dream growing season. Does this mean that grands crus underperformed? Not at all, but it clearly does mean that the performance gap between the top and the bottom of the scale is diminished. With their unequalled concentration and texture and unique site signature, grands crus remain the quality reference points of the vintage but there has rarely been such a wide choice of great Pinot Noir drinking lower down. 

The early comments made by growers and echoed by us to the effect that red 2005s would not shut down in bottle now appear in some cases optimistic, or just plain wrong. There is no cause to doubt that 2005 will indeed offer a long, smooth, ageing curve and that the fine integration of fruit, tannin and acid remove many of the barriers to early drinking at least at village AOC level and below. And each subsequent vintage underlines just how rare it is to find such exciting Burgundy Pinot Noir at the bottom of the price scale, no mean virtue given sterling’s current weakness against the euro. Securing decent stocks of entry-level red Burgundy for consumption over the next five years is one thing; predicting peak drinking times for the senior wines – still in their infancy – is quite another. The dense, rich materials of top red 2005s offer none of the soft cushioning of the fleshy 2003s – a vintage growing ever more classical, by the way, with each passing year. Premier and grand cru red 2005s need several years to fulfil their huge potential and will, in any case, drink after 2007, 2006, 2004 and 2003. It will only really be after two years in bottle (in 2009) that the time scale for these wines can be realistically estimated.