Alive but dead

This month, I had the pleasure of tasting old Burgundies back to 1923 from the magnificent cellar of Bouchard Pere et fils.

It was a great tasting with only well-preserved and optimum bottles – for the vintage. The team of Frédéric Engerer of Domaine Artemis has done an outstanding job finding great bottles from the vintages ending on 3 … i.e. the 2013, 2003, 1993, 1983, 1973, 1963, 1953, 1943, 1933 and 1923 vintages covering 100 years since the current vintage 2023!

All the wines showed well, with the ups and downs one would expect to find when the wines are selected to cover the time period … in specific years. Some years were difficult, whereas others were perhaps even abundant.

The luxury of the Bourchard cellar is unique, as it was possible to pick and discard bottles to find a good example … wines with 100 years in the cellar do show big variation … between life and death … despite the bottles in the Bouchard cellar usually being recorked.

So these wines were all alive …

Alive and kicking – vin d`émotion

If one is tough, only great wines in great vintages are true vin d’émotion when they reach an age of 30 years.

To have true liveliness in an old bottle like 1929 Musigny requires luck, outstanding provenance and transport (preferably none) … but it is a rare occasion to have true liveliness in Burgundies that are 40, even 60 years or older.

Sometimes, these old wines come in different shapes and forms …

The Mysterious Musigny 1929

There will however always be bottle variation … so luck is required.

The best of the rest … still alive or dead

To be honest, many Burgundies, and even other old wines, are drunk when there is no lively fruit left in the wine. To say it’s completely dead would be wrong, but there is certainly no hope of getting some hedonistic glow to cheer your palate.

There are however some Burgundies that maintain a charm and a fruity quality even after 40 to 50 years …

These wines can be truly delightful even though they don’t have the full vin d`émotion scale to offer. Wines like the Louis Jadot, Volnay Santenots 1980 do have a lovely drinkable note when I drank that in 2015 at Auberge d’Ill in Alsace. The comments say it all – what the best of the rest can taste like – if you are lucky.

To be honest, I doubt that this was showing a full-blown Vin d’émotion glow when it was young … that’s not a Louis Jadot thing … is it?

But I drank it with pleasure, and I enjoyed it tremendously … I couldn’t ask more from a wine.

It is – to me – pretty clear that generous years back in time … 1980, 1971 … and there are more, and then, the illustrious 1929 are all wines that have a basic liveliness and joyfulness that seems to live on in the best wines.

So, look for vintages with liveliness and joy … not greatness alone! We are talking about the reds here.

Alive but dead

This category is not dead or over the hill per se, but they may as well be, as there is no trace of enjoyable fruit left. The tar (ageing over-extraction perhaps) and the austere notes … the unclean Pinot flavours … signs are many.

Some are just the victim of bad provenance or transport … but all too often, the victim of vintage, viticulture and lack of talent in the cellar.

Over the hill

Why bother …

… always remember … the wines should be kept well at all times … and there are clearly places where I would never never buy an old Burgundy.

Think …

A lot of Burgundy lovers taste old wines … 1970s from Henri Jayer, from vintages that are long forgotten … I am sure they still have the potential to be good, but in reality, the number of bottles that were produced was very limited … very limited even in 1978.

So, the chance that you are drinking the real thing … hmmm … Secondly, the Jayer wines, as great as they were (sometimes still can be), were never seen as wines for 50 years of cellaring.

Enjoy!