FT : A difficult year for Burgundy
A first taste of the ‘nightmare’ 2024 growing season
“Nightmare”, “misery”, “exhausting”, “unremittingly grim”, “desperate” — capped by “gruesome” final yields — those are some words that have been used to describe the 2024 burgundy growing season. For the UK merchants currently trying to sell the resulting wines, a very different narrative prevails: it’s a “classic”, “precise”, “elegant” vintage, “defined by freshness, clarity and poise”.
Burgundian vignerons have been worrying about the dangerously drier climate that seems to be heading their way for years, but in 2024 it was wet weather that proved the real hazard. They had almost enough rain for a decade’s worth of growing seasons. During the crucial flowering period in late spring, heavy rainfall in both frost-hit Chablis and the main Côte d’Or region positively pummelled the little vine flowers that should have developed into grapes, with later-flowering Pinot Noirs particularly hard hit.
The rain, accompanied by unusually low temperatures, continued throughout June and July, encouraging rampant mildew that, unusually, had begun as early as the flowering season. Almost as soon as one fungicide was administered, it was washed off the vines, which then required another round of spraying. According to Mark Haisma, who professed himself “delighted, at least, that we managed to get to harvest and did actually harvest something”, average annual rainfall records were smashed only halfway through the year.
Vines at the soggy foot of the Côte d’Or, the “golden slope” that’s home to Burgundy’s most famous vineyards, tended to suffer more than those higher up, where some of the rain drained away downhill.
One after another, vignerons who had previously committed themselves to organic viticulture decided to abandon that path in favour of more effective systemic sprays, simply to save their crop. Thibaud Clerget of Yvon Clerget told me he managed to stick to his organic principles only by going through the vineyard with permitted treatments 16 times — far more than usual. Elsewhere in the Côte de Beaune, Matthew Hayes, Burgundy specialist for JancisRobinson.com, reported that the much-admired Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey of Chassagne-Montrachet managed “respectable” yields of as much as 35 to 40 hl/ha (average in most years, but unusually high for 2024), by abandoning his usual organic preparations early on.
Admittedly, the Côte de Beaune, with its greater reliance on Chardonnay, was slightly better off than the Côte de Nuits in the northern half of the Côte d’Or. There were widespread reports of potential red wine crop losses of up to 80 per cent, with the white wine crop down by up to 30 per cent.
Late August brought a little respite. The grapes that had escaped mildew and rot benefited from slightly warmer weather, which raised their sugar levels. But the alcohol content in the resulting wines is unusually low, often less than 13 per cent. Uncharacteristically for this warmer century, many vignerons felt compelled to add a little sugar before or during fermentation to increase the final alcohol level.
Thanks to the cool summer, and the grapes’ struggle to ripen, acid levels in the resulting wines, reds as well as whites, are high.
The most successful reds could be described as pretty, but never as concentrated; and in some examples this seemed to accentuate the acidity and made the wines taste a bit raw. They are relatively pale, with tannins barely perceptible, and some wines already seemed dangerously evolved. A vintage to drink relatively early, then — if you can afford to buy it.
If 2024 had been a generous crop, there might have been some hope of a reduction in the sky-high prices of burgundy we have seen in recent years but the fact that 2025 is also a relatively small vintage has kept prices more or less stable.
The paucity of grapes made life difficult in many a cellar. Tanks that would usually be full for the fermentation were only half-full or less. This increases the risk of oxidation, microbial infection or, the vigneron’s nightmare, a stuck fermentation (where the yeast stops converting sugars into alcohol prematurely). In recent years, many producers have been cutting back on the proportion of new oak they use because oaky wines are so unfashionable. And anyway, the 2024 fruit was hardly robust enough to handle the impact of new oak. But for wines, such as grands and some premiers crus, for which a higher-than-average proportion of new oak barrels are customarily employed, there were instances of having to use as much as 50 per cent, simply because there was only enough wine to fill two barrels.
One of the major operations in red winemaking is extraction, persuading dark-skinned grapes to release colour and flavour from the skins (see below). Grégory Patriat, Jean-Claude Boisset’s winemaker, who seems to have managed to make a fist of what he called his “garage wines” because quantities were so small, observed that in the cellar the danger with the 2024s was “to try to extract what wasn’t there”.
In Burgundy, and with Pinot Noir vinifications in general, there has been a fixation on the proportion of whole bunches, or whole clusters, of grapes, that go into the fermentation vat rather than being destemmed. The stems and bunches can usefully aerate the fermenting must and can add freshness to the resulting wine, especially if the stems haven’t turned from green to brown (which Patriat claims hardly ever happens in Burgundy).
Because Chardonnay grapes were less affected by 2024’s vicissitudes, white burgundies — ever popular according to UK wine merchants — are more widely available than reds, even if they also tend to taste brisk — sorry, “classic” and “precise” — rather than generous.
Despite all this doom and gloom about the 2024s, and their paucity, London’s customarily hectic week of burgundy tastings took place as usual this month with what felt like as many different samples as ever — presumably spurred by the UK merchants’ desire for cash — even if the available quantities of each wine were presumably much smaller than usual. Quite a few of the tastings included numerous older vintages as well, indicating a certain resistance to burgundy price levels among the merchants’ customers.
One important thing to note, however, is that the vineyards south of the Côte d’Or — in the Côte Chalonnaise, the Mâconnais and Beaujolais — suffered far less in 2024 and quantities produced there were much more generous. It’s also true that the wines from these regions, less widely shown in London than the Côte d’Or classics, are not just generally much cheaper than those from the Côte d’Or, they have also become significantly more sophisticated in recent years. For 2024s, head south for value.
The most successful producers I encountered in the nine tastings I attended are listed here but my colleagues tasted at 10.
