Newsletter No. 22: 14^th January 2006

The New Year for the UK wine trade always starts with something of a bang, effectively rousing one from the inevitable torpor left by the Christmas holiday.

Suddenly one's email box and postal deliveries are full of wine offers from merchants big and small and importers commence a concentrated schedule of wine tastings, each year starting with the new burgundy vintage and then geographically diversifying into the far-flung - New Zealand precedes the Australia Day marathon - and the rather more local with the new Rhône vintage and embryonic clarets.

Bowes Wine has been using the M4 as a portal to the London-based pleasures of these tastings and a great deal of exciting wine has been rolling around the analytical centres of our frontal cortices: the perfect preparation for our trip to Burgundy, to where we head on Sunday.  

"Aha!" I hear some mutter. "Bowes Wine is off to one of the world centres of all things wine-related and gastronomic and is expecting us to believe that they're doing a day's work."

Let me straightaway disabuse dear readers thinking such unkind thoughts. For starters, Victoria is now super-pregnant. Normally boasting the wiry, nipping-hither-and-yon-on-the-hockey-pitch sort of physique, she now looks as though she has taken pity on a moderately-sized Space Hopper found abandoned and shivering by the wayside and is trying to restore its core temperature under the confines of her cardie. A shooting stick will be required in the bourguignon cellars to support said Hopper and its mother-to-be.

Secondly, Burgundy is a trifle chilly at present. It's always a bit parky at this time of year, as one can expect of a destination situated in the centre of a substantial land mass, but is minus 15 really necessary? Motorways have been closed. A number of Space Hoppers have actually expired in the chill. So it’s long johns for me and some sort of giant furry egg-cup for Mrs B.

It's an interesting vintage, this '04. There's no doubt that they've had a super-fine vintage in the Rhône Valley and we will look forward to offering these wines in due course (after another horrendous sojourn in deepest France, of course). Bordeaux produced a rather lovely bevy of wines; the sort of wines that don't shout and make a fuss, but just quietly get on with the business of ageing in our cellars into the sort of bottles that one produces when visited at home by someone who says in passing, "Claret; what's that about then?"

In Burgundy the story is rather more convoluted. There was some rain at harvest time and a degree of rot in the grapes. The great shame is that that is sufficient for most people to write it off altogether. And yet, as ever, some knowing sages in the Côte d'Or have managed to do the business. It was ever thus. Take 1983, for example: another year largely written off by the press and wine-buying public. Hail wrought havoc in vineyards up and down the Côte and much of the wine produced from the fruit has that tell-tale metallic edge - most unpleasant - that is the result of fermenting grapes damaged by flying ice. And yet at Armand Rousseau in Gevrey they were quietly producing some of the greatest wines ever to have emanated from that great estate; wines that are still capable of defying one's belief at the extremes of Pinot's capabilities.

As we should all know by now, burgundy (and Burgundy, for that matter) is all about terroir. The best of 2004 has terroir in spades. These are wines that Pinot lovers should seek out. We have tasted Gevreys that couldn't possibly be mistaken for anything else, so feral, exciting and, well, Gevrey are they; we've been sipping Vosnes that stick their noses in the air and waft past the taste buds in distinctly regal fashion, as all good Vosne should, and we've found Chambolles that are the epitome of the appellation i.e. coming across like a very elegant and sexy young woman who goes to the gym, perhaps after a handful of steroids.

(I'm not going to hoodwink you. We have also tasted some pitiful dross. The vintage needs more picking through than the workplace of the seven dwarves in Snow White and this we intend to do.)

If anything the white wines of burgundy in '04 have outdone the reds. Take a tattoo gun filled with chardonnay and use it to etch an ice sculpture on one's tongue and one gets something of the appeal here. These are fine, focussed, Dietrich-cool wines bright enough to light the dark places of the world.

There will be more to report on our return from our pilgrimage.

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