Hospices de Beaune 2025 – Are You Ready for the Élevage!!

The Hospices de Beaune auction is NOW – today – November 16th 2025.

This is a charity auction for a good cause, so outside normal investments and evaluation criteria. And remember that generosity is a good thing when making your bid.

Winehog and the Hospice wines

Readers of the Winehog will know that I primarily recommend the Hospice wines to professional buyers, buyers with a need to get many bottles of a 1er Cru or a Grand Cru. This is where the Hospices de Beaune has its strongest merits.

There are therefore special reasons why you perhaps should read the rest of this article, as the Hospices de Beaune offers some possibilities not found elsewhere in Burgundy.

The Hospices de Beaune offers the opportunity to buy full barrels (288 bottles or so) of 1er Cru and Grand Cru wines of the latest vintage … i.e. the 2025 vintage.

This is unique in Burgundy, where six to twelve bottles is the normal allocation for a Grand Cru.

With the Hospices wines, you need to choose the right person to do the élevage for the best results and full hedonistic pleasure from the wine.

If you go on the offensive with the élevage and do more to adapt the wine to a more modern expression – i.e. less impression of the new oak barrels, then you could possibly adapt and transform the Hospice wines into something even more interesting.

The Hospices … how it works!

The Hospices de Beaune wines are all made from the vineyards that have been donated from the past centuries. The wines are auctioned off in November, just after the harvest. The buyers decide who will do the élevage: maturing and finishing the wines, then bottling them.

The élevage can include a change of oak, more or less sulphur, length of maturation, and so forth. So, the wines are sort of adopted by the éleveur, who seeks to optimise the offspring of the Hospices.

In my experience, the élevage can have a great influence on the final wine and the pleasure you will get from it. Sadly, many of the big élevateurs don’t bother and go for 100% new oak from Hospices de Beaune.

The base wine

The wines of the Hospices de Beaune are sound and healthy regarding the reds, at least. I won’t comment on the whites at all, as I have too little experience with these!!

The Hospices de Beaune concept is to begin its wines in new-oak barrels. For me, this sort of limits the prospects of – especially – the lesser wines. Mainly, the 1ers Crus.

Very few in Burgundy raise 1ers Crus in 100% new oak these days. So, why do this with a Hospices wine?

In my experience, this over-oaks the wines to a degree where they can become problematic. If you like strongly oaked wines, this is fine by me, but in the midst of global warming, this is not the recipe for an elegant Burgundy.

So the base setting for a Hospices wine is somewhat … hmm … struggling to find a nice word.

For the Grands Crus, there is a more realistic choice: using the Hospices’ new barrel while adapting other parameters. Again, this depends on your taste and the barrel used for the Hospices wine. In reality, I don’t think that most Grand Cru bottles of similar quality would undergo élevage in 100% new oak.

This leaves quite a few decisions to the buyer – or the éleveur – to make a really good wine. It’s not just bottling without thinking about the optimal élevage.

This is not intended to be a critique of the Hospices de Beaune’s winemaking. Rather, it is a recommendation of its red wines These are, in reality, the only good Burgundy wines that can be acquired in large quantities.

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