A Judgement, Once a Year

Sugar rises. Acidity falls. Both happen continuously through September, in opposite directions, at rates that depend on the weather.

Meanwhile the tannins in the skins and seeds ripen on their own schedule, which is related to sugar accumulation and not the same thing. Seeds go from green and bitter to brown and nutty. Skin tannins soften.

Pick early and you get freshness, structure and green tannins. Pick late and you get ripe tannins, flabby acidity and high alcohol. There is no measurement that resolves this, because the three variables do not arrive together and the grower is choosing a compromise between them.

It is the most consequential decision of the year and it is made on a judgement, which is why two neighbours with adjacent parcels can pick ten days apart in the same vintage. That spread is not one of them making a mistake. It is a real stylistic argument (freshness and structure against richness and immediate appeal) and both produce excellent wine in the right hands.

It is also, incidentally, the strongest available evidence that the grower matters as much as the ground, since the parcels are identical and the wines are not.

Hand harvesting is the norm in the Côte d'Or, and the reasons are practical rather than ceremonial. Machines shake the vine and collect berries rather than whole bunches, which rules out whole-cluster fermentation. They cannot reject rot, which a person can. The slopes are steep and the rows are a metre apart. And at Côte d'Or prices, the cost of a picking team is easy to justify, which is not true in the Mâconnais, where machines are common and sensible.

Sorting is the quiet revolution of the last thirty years and probably explains more about improving average quality than any fashionable technique.

Even a clean vintage produces unripe bunches, raisined berries, leaves, stems and the occasional snail. A sorting table with people picking those out before the fruit reaches the vat was unusual in the 1970s and is standard at any serious address now. Optical sorters, which photograph each berry and eject the ones that fail, have spread since the 2000s.

The effect is that less is left to chance. Ordinary vintages are markedly better than they used to be, and the gap between a good year and a difficult one has narrowed, because the difficult year's problems are now removed on a conveyor belt rather than pressed into the wine.

Two things about ripeness show how far the climate has moved.

Chaptalisation (adding sugar to the must before fermentation, which ferments out and raises alcohol rather than sweetening the wine) was permitted in Burgundy precisely because ripeness was historically unreliable. It was routine. Its use has fallen sharply, because the grapes now arrive ripe enough without it.

The opposite problem has appeared instead. Sugar accumulates faster in warm conditions than tannins ripen, so a grower waiting for the seeds to brown finds the potential alcohol has run ahead. Red Burgundy that was routinely 12.5% in the 1980s is frequently 13.5% or more now, and in hot vintages higher.

The responses are all attempts to decouple two things that used to arrive together: picking earlier and accepting slightly less phenolic ripeness, raising the trellis so the fruit is shaded by its own canopy, leaving more leaves, and in some cases acidifying where the rules allow.

None of these is a solution, and the fact that a region famous for struggling to ripen its fruit now spends its energy trying to slow ripening down is the clearest single statement of what has changed.