The AOC Bourgogne mousseux concerns only Sparkling red wines from the Burgundy vineyards. The 600 hectares of its production area are spread over communes in four departments: 54 communes in Yonne, 91 in Côte-d'Or, 154 in Saône-et-Loire and 85 in Rhône. The continental Climate of the vineyards is influenced by the Mediterranean from the South and the Atlantic from the west. The terroirs are therefore subject to major variations, reinforced by the changing composition of the soils, depending on their location in the region.
Burgundians therefore distinguish "climats", to reflect the complexity of these different terroirs. The production of these sparkling red wines is nowadays very marginal. They are made using the traditional Champagne method, in the same way as the AOC Crémant de Bourgogne. A minimum of 9 months Maturation in the bottle allows them to develop their Powerful red fruit aromas.
I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...
The fine wine market goes into autumn 2022 after a particularly strong period of gains, although there has been greater uncertainty about momentum in recent weeks. At Liv-ex, a global marketplace for the trade, the Liv-ex 100 index dipped 0.3% in July 2022 but had risen every month for two years prior to that. UK-based merchant Bordeaux Index recently reported prices on the market up by 10% in the first half of 2022, with Burgundy up 26% on average. Strong activity on the LiveTrade online tradin ...
Liv-ex said the trade ‘is reporting strong sales’ of Burgundy 2020 wines following the first en primeur releases in recent weeks, despite higher prices. Decanter’s Charles Curtis MW rated Côte d’Or reds and whites highly in his Burgundy 2020 overview, published earlier this month. Liv-ex’s new Burgundy report also suggested that getting hold of some wines has become even more difficult. ‘The trade continues to report an insatiable global buying appetite that has led to reduced alloca ...
