Where to Buy Burgundy Wines in Phoenix AZ

20 Great Values in '05 Burgundies

The 2005 red Burgundies are extraordinary.  The vintage will stand alongside other great ones in Burgundy for reds, such as 1959, 1961, 1964, 1978, 1985 and 1990.  The whites are not far behind.  I gave my preliminary assessment of the vintage based mostly on tastings barrel samples in Burgundy about six months ago.  Now that the wines are arriving on retailers' shelves, it's time to take a closer look at this remarkable vintage and recommend specific wines. 

The 2005 vintage in Burgundy is superb because the weather throughout the growing season was perfect.  It was warm and sunny throughout Burgundy when it was supposed to be and it rained only at the correct times.  The grapes ripened slowly and evenly.  There was no rush to harvest because the weather was sunny and rain-free.  As a result, the grapes were in perfect condition.

Alex Gambal, one of Burgundy's up-and-coming young négociants, told me that in 2005 he had only two workers performing triage at the winery (examining and removing diseased grapes before they head into the fermentation vat) - and they mostly watched the perfect grapes go by - compared to more than a dozen workers scrutinizing the harvest in 2006.

The grapes were so healthy that maceration could proceed leisurely, extracting the maximum from the grapes, without risk of including 'off' flavors, according to Jacques Lardière, Maison Louis Jadot's masterful winemaker.

Tasting the wines in bottle confirm my initial impressions of the reds and whites.  While there is uniform agreement about the superb quality of the red wines, I, along with some growers and producers, often preferred the more structured 2004 whites to the richer - and at this stage - more forward 2005 whites.  That said, there were some absolutely fabulous white wines made in 2005.

This pair of vintages for whites echoes previous pairs, such as 1985 and 1986, 1989 and 1990 and 1995 and 1996, in which one is tighter and one more opulent in their youth.  It will be fascinating to watch how these two very different vintages develop over the next several decades.

Great vintages, such as 2005, produce wonderful wines at all levels, from the simplest Bourgogne Rouge and lesser-known village wines, such as Marsannay or Santenay, to the grand cru.  And with the rising prices of the 2005s coupled with the plummeting value of the dollar, it's time to look at village wines in general.  Village wines, those that are usually a blend of wine from various non-premier or grand cru vineyards within a single village, such as Meursault, may lack cachet, but can offer great value when made by talented producers, such as Jadot or Latour, especially in 2005.

The 20 recommended wines below all have a suggested retail price of less than $50, which is a lot of money for a bottle of wine, but well priced for 2005 Burgundy.

White Wines

Faiveley, Merc...

An Early Overview of 2007 Burgundies

Even though it's hard to recommend specific wines from the 2007 vintage at this stage because most are unfinished and still developing in barrel, an early assessment of the 2007 vintage in Burgundy is important because it helps determine a buying strategy now. The size and quality of the 2007s will affect prices of both existing stocks and the new vintage. So, even an early look at the new vintage as a whole will help you to determine whether you want to save your money and buy the '07s when they are offered for sale or scour the market now for the remaining wines from prior vintages.

My assessments are based on visits to Burgundy in November 2007, March, June, and September of 2008, and tastings in the cellars of large négociants, such as Jadot, Latour, Bichot and small négociants/growers, such as Alex Gambal.

The Perils of Barrel Tastings

Tasting wines from barrel is fraught with difficulty and consumers should remember that when wine critics give their assessments of individual wines based on barrel samples.

Let's start with the obvious. Is the barrel new, one year or two years old? Many producers in Burgundy age a portion of a wine in new oak barrels and a portion in older oak barrels and then blend them prior to bottling. Having tasted the same wine from barrels of different ages, I can tell you that the age of the barrel has an enormous impact on the taste of the wine.

Next, who made the barrel? During the barrel-making process, the staves are heated (toasted) to allow them to bend and be shaped into a barrel and to impart another layer of flavor. Whether the wine is aged in a light-, medium- or heavy-toasted barrel influences its flavor.

Now for the less obvious, but no less important, variables. Sugar fermentation and later, malolactic fermentation, does not proceed at the same rate in all barrels. Alex Gambal, a quality-oriented small négociant, noted extreme variability in the pace of malolactic fermentation with the '07s. Even seasoned veterans, like Jacques Lardière, Maison Louis Jadot's wizard winemaker, can't explain the difference in the speed of fermentation--either sugar or malolactic--one barrel to the next. How long a wine is tasted after the completion of sugar or malolactic fermentation, or how recently the wine was racked from one barrel to another, has an enormous effect on the taste of the wine.

In Burgundy, where there is no blending of wines made from different grapes as there is in Bordeaux, the winemaker still must blend the different barrels for the final wine. Hence, tasting from one barrel doesn't mean you are tasting the final wine. Furthermore, a winemaker may declassify some higher pedigree appellations into less prestigious ones depending on how they are aging in barrel and market demands. At Jadot, for example, Lardière always blends a substantial amount o...

Buying Burgundy: The Problem, and a Solution

My friend and WRO colleague Michael Apstein--who is a borderline psychotic in his love of Burgundy--often observes that getting excellent wines from this great but inconsistent region requires that one always "remember the producer." Psychotic or not, he's right about this, since experience demonstrates that quality in Burgundy correlates more closely with particular domaines than with either vintages or vineyard sites.

To be sure, vineyard sites are vitally important in Burgundy, which is the land of terroir par excellence. However, almost everybody who really knows Burgundy would agree to both of two propositions that seem to contradict one another: that the qualitative distinctions between grand cru and supposedly lesser premier cru vineyards are very real and very important, and that you'd nevertheless be much smarter to buy premier cru wines from excellent producers than grand cru wines from mediocre ones.

Vintages really matter also, as was proved to me once again during a week that I spent tasting in Burgundy last month. For example, the 2003 and 2004 vintage reds are so different in general that they seem not just from different years but from different planets. The 2003s are generally so ripe that they seem downright cooked and raisiny, whereas the reds are often so under-ripe as to seem vegetal and weedy. And yet, at the best domains, I was able to find some beautifully ripened 2004s and some fresh, pure 2003s. Picking wines by producer in these vintages makes excellent sense.

Yet, there is a real limitation that attaches to Apstein's advice in practical terms. (The buy-by-producer principle is advocated by many people other than Apstein, but it is much more fun to pick on him than to speak in generalities.) The problem stems from the fact that Burgundy is produced by a few big houses but also by hundreds and hundreds of domaines, most of them quite tiny by Bordeaux or Napa standards. And while a professional wine writer or member of the wine trade may be able to keep all of these domaine names and performance profiles straight, most consumers don't stand a chance.

Burgundy's producer roster is famously fragmented, largely due to the peculiarities of French inheritance laws requiring that estates be divided equally among the owners' offspring. New domaines come into existence continually, and old ones regularly pass out of existence (often because a son or daughter isn't available to step into the breech after a retirement, or when siblings can't get along after trying to keep a domaine whole by running it together). Moreover, domaines get notably better and worse due to generational turnover. Sometimes a son or daughter is a block off the old chip, and the estate gets a lot better with a young vintner, but often the successor is a mere chip off the old block, and quality slips.

Since it is damn...