The month of May has been nearly as murderous in the Burgundy vineyards as April. The frost just after Easter did the worst of the damage, but once the extreme cold let up, it was replaced by cool wet weather with scarcely a sight of the sun. The already struggling vines found it very difficult to develop. Some of the surviving embryo buds have aborted even before the flowering, which now looks likely to take place from the middle of June.
June, though, has arrived with a burst of sunshine and the belated arrival of summery temperatures. Fingers crossed! We shall certainly have a very small crop, but there is no reason that good weather across the summer should not still deliver fine quality.
As for me, I have been very busy on two fronts: firstly, the final chapters of Inside Burgundy have been delivered and we look forward to launching the book in mid-September, all being well. Secondly, I have been going over the 15,000+ wines on our JMIB database with a toothcomb, eradicating as much as possible inconsistencies of description of the same wines across different vintages. This combined with other enhancements to the database will provide a much smoother service when we go live later this month.
Meanwhile, a significant backlog of tasting notes has been building up in my files, which I shall now be fine-tuning in preparation for uploading a series of reports through June and July. These include visits to a further, explorations of the appellations of the Auxerrois, and of Moulin-à-Vent in the Beaujolais, the 2018s from Joseph Roty, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Domaine Coche-Dury, some old vintages from Camille Giroud, several of which will be released on to the market this year, and a vertical of Jean-Philippe Fichet’s Meursault Chevalières. Then I shall be putting my tasting boots on once again and heading to Chablis and the Côte Chalonnaise.
Look out also for the launch of 67 Pall Mall TV on 21st June, where I shall be appearing regularly as Burgundy correspondent.
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