Small but luminous
‘I would be happy to make these wines every year’ – Cyprien Arlaud
It was a vintage that drove vignerons to despair. Extremely difficult conditions in the vineyards of Burgundy in 2024 cut a swathe through potential yields. Cold and rain badly disrupted the crucial flowering period, and virulent attacks of mildew through the wet spring killed off many incipient grapes. On the Côte de Nuits, many growers lost 80% of their potential crop. Harvest saw the smallest crop in over 40 years. On our visit to Burgundy to taste 2024s, several winemakers voiced a concern we don’t normally hear in en primeur tasting: the impact of the season on the mental health of growers and vineyard workers.
But there’s another side to 2024 Burgundy. August was glorious. The crop was by then so small that it ripened easily, and what fruit did make it to harvest, made it in beautiful condition. The wines we tasted were utterly charming, in both red and white. They are perfectly ripe, but with a strong vein of freshness; and because the fruit load on the vine was so small, the grapes were also very concentrated. Charles Ballot-Millot told us that ‘the quality of the grapes and the balance at harvest showed it would be a great vintage’. That combination of freshness and concentration in the wines is highly appealing, and they will perform well in cellars. As Antoine Gouges said, ‘We’re happy with the quality, not with the quantity.’ Cyprien Arlaud, a man who cares deeply about the state of his vineyards, told us that despite all the difficulties, he is so enamoured of the style of 2024 that ‘I would be happy to make these wines every year’.
The season: toughing it out
2024 was not a cold year, overall. Counted over the whole year, temperatures were broadly average. But the 2024 Burgundy growing season was defined by the very cold, wet spring, and the contrast with the hot August.
Winter 2023-2024 was mild and wet. That meant that mildew spores, which become dormant in cold conditions, were active early, setting the stage for what would follow. After a warm spell at the end of March which encouraged the vines (and the mildew), cold and wet conditions set in, and didn’t lift till summer. Vignerons at least welcomed the fact that there was no significant April frost to kill early buds, as has happened in several other recent vintages (notably 2021). But the cold conditions through spring retarded vine growth. The first attack of mildew came unusually early in the season, in May, before flowering, and caused some vulnerable young buds to fall off the vines.
Although mildew caused a lot of damage in 2024, vignerons were clear to us that what caused the greatest losses were the poor conditions at flowering. Flowering is a crucial point in the vine cycle, when buds open into flowers, and pollinated flowers go on to become grapes. In the northern hemisphere, flowering usually happens between May and June. But the wet and especially cold conditions over that period in Burgundy in 2024 were terrible for flowering. Many flowers were never pollinated and fell away. There was also a high incidence of millerandage (a mix of underdeveloped and normal-sized grapes on the same bunch). By now, vignerons clearly knew that final yields were going to be poor. A second major wave of mildew swept through the vineyards in the second half of June. ‘It never stopped’, complained Jean-Nicolas Méo. Vignerons waged a constant battle against mildew through repeated treatments in the vineyard until conditions finally improved in August.
Dry, sunny, hot weather finally set in in August. The second half of August was very hot, and grapes ripened under beautiful conditions. September was cooler, with intermittent rain again. By mid-September, sugar levels in the grapes had stopped increasing and leaves started to turn orange, a clear sign it was time to pick. With few grapes to pick, harvests at many addresses were completed within a week, though in a few places they carried over into early October. Most winemakers told us that what fruit had survived all the way to harvest was in very good condition and not much sorting was required.
The short truth
‘It was the smallest vintage of my career,’ Ghislaine Barthod told us, and almost every other winemaker we spoke to agreed. (Only Jean-Nicolas Méo demurred, telling us that his final yields in the very hot, concentrated 2003 vintage were even worse). For the region as a whole, 2024 is recorded as having the lowest yields since 1981, when a combination of frost and then rain decimated the crop.
In the Côte de Nuits, yields were often around the 12-15 hl/ha (hectolitres per hectare) mark. For comparison, Antoine Gouges says ‘correct’ yields for Pinot Noir should be around the 35hl/ha mark. Antoine defines ‘correct’ as the ideal balancing point between good volumes and good concentration (though that point will naturally shift according to the prevailing vintage conditions). Chardonnay is not as picky as Pinot Noir, and can comfortably make great wines around the 40-45 hl/ha mark.
The losses were not spread evenly. On flat sites where water can accumulate, losses were worse. On the well-drained premier and grand cru sites which cluster on the slope, they were less bad. Bourgogne Rouge and village wines suffered proportionally greater losses than many premier and grand cru wines. In 2021, when frost caused bad losses up and down the scale, Lafarge blended their surviving premier cru grapes into a single premier cru bottling. In 2024, with losses clustering towards the bottom end of the scale, they have still been able to make all their premier crus as distinct bottlings.
On the Côte de Beaune, white wines fared better than reds. Vincent Rapet told us he lost a third of his crop of white grapes, as opposed to two-thirds of his crop of red grapes. The difference is that where they are planted side-by-side, Chardonnay tends to be planted higher up the slope, on soils that naturally drain better, while Pinot will be planted lower down the slope where more water accumulates. The soils on the Côte de Beaune are a little sandier than on the Côte de Nuits. That goes some way to explaining the lighter-bodied, softer-tannin character of reds from the Côte de Beaune – and it also means those soils drain better. Some growers reported healthy yields for white wines of 40hl/ha.
In the winery
‘Extraction is all about balance,’ Mathilde Grivot told us. ‘If you do it too gently, you lose many things and make a thin wine. If you do it too hard, you risk importing green elements and bitter tannins’. In 2024, those grapes that made it to the end of the season were fully mature, with a natural concentration. Most growers we spoke told us they kept extractions gentle since the grapes naturally had a lot to give.
Whole bunch?
In recent years, increasing numbers of growers have been experimenting with incorporating stems as well as grapes into their fermentations. Stems can bring a very different character to a wine. When it goes well, they can bring exuberant aromatics and a sense of freshness. But some growers prefer to avoid stems because they feel a ‘stemmy’ character can muddle the sense of terroir in their wine, and some tasters dislike a prominent taste of stems (though that also does tend to resolve with age). Unripe stems bring an unpleasant, bitter flavour. As stems take longer to ripen than grapes, grapes on the vine may be fully ripe, but stems may yet not be. Ghislaine Barthod has never used stems in her fermentations. Leaving aside other considerations, she says stems wouldn’t suit the domaine, as they always like to pick early for freshness, so they’d be running the risk of unripe stems.
In 2024, there was widespread concern that stems might not have fully ripened after the long cool start to the season. Some growers who tend to favour stems were more cautious this year. Gilbert Felettig often uses a significant proportion of stems in his fermentations, but he avoided them completely in 2024. Lafarge have never used stems in their Burgundy fermentations, but do habitually use them in their Lafarge-Vial Beaujolais wines. But with conditions in Beaujolais similar to Burgundy in 2024, they completely avoided stems. Cyprien Arlaud was an exception here, and with a significant proportion of stems, his 2024s are exquisite. But he only used stems in his premier and grand cru wines, and those sites were less troubled by the damp conditions of 2024.
Boeuf Bourguignon
After the broadly cool conditions of the vintage, everybody chaptalized in 2024. With the natural sugar levels in the grapes suggesting wines of 11-12.5% alcohol, sugar was added to fermentations to bring the wines up to the 12.5-13% level they will be bottled at.
No grower is ashamed to admit they chaptalize; it’s something many growers do even in hotter years when it’s technically unnecessary, in order to prolong fermentations. ‘It’s like Boeuf Bouguignon,’ Mathilde Grivot told us, ‘the longer you cook it, the better it is’. A dose of sugar towards the end of a fermentation can prolong it by 2-3 days, leading to more developed flavour complexity.
There was no danger of anyone needing to acidify in 2024, as they might need to do in a hot year. But as Jacques Devauges at Domaine des Lambrays noted, it is far better to pick early and need to chaptalize than to pick late and need to acidify. Chaptalisation prolongs fermentation and helps the wine knit together. Extra acidity never integrates and is likely to make an awkward, unbalanced wine.
New oak
Many growers cut back severely on their use of new oak in 2024. With yields on individual cuvées very low and in some cases only amounting to a few barrels, there was a widespread fear that a small proportion of new oak would make an excessive mark. 2024s have a delicate, chiselled style that is highly terroir expressive, and many growers told us that they didn’t want to mask that with prominent oak. Gilbert Felettig bucked this trend, and (as is his practice) used 100% new oak on all his premier crus. He also pointed the difference in pricing. A new barrel may cost a winemaker 1000 euros (or more) whereas a one or two-year-old barrel may only cost them 250 euros.
Mildew
Mildew (properly downy mildew) wreaked havoc in the vineyards of Burgundy in 2024. This fungal-like condition flourishes in cool, damp conditions, spreading across vine leaves, inhibiting photosynthesis and preventing fruit from ripening. Affected leaves and grapes will fall off the vine. If unchecked it can quickly wipe out a whole crop.
Downy mildew is indigenous to the eastern United States, and like the related condition powdery mildew (which prefers warmer wet weather to the cooler wet weather downy mildew likes), it arrived on vines imported from the United States around 1880. These were probably vines intended for grafting to protect European viticulture from the phylloxera aphid, another original American import. (Beware American vines bearing gifts!) In French, downy mildew is mildiou and powdery mildew is oidium. The unholy trilogy of downy mildew, powdery mildew and phylloxera together devastated European vineyards in the late 19th century, ending viticulture in some areas, making it marginal in many others. These vineyard afflictions have never since left the scene, though winemakers have developed coping strategies.
With all the difficulties around downy mildew in 2024, vineyard treatments were a big topic of discussion on our visit. There are two main approaches, either the copper-based sprays developed in the nineteenth century, and which are permitted within prescribed limits in organic viticulture, or more modern chemical sprays, which are not permitted within organic viticulture. Neither is perfect.
Copper-based sprays are contact-effective. They are not absorbed by the vine, but they are absorbed by the soil (and in excess may cause long-term damage). They are washed off by rain, which means that if it rains, you need to go back to the vineyard and re-spray. Modern chemical fungicides and anti-mildew products are absorbed by the vine, and are disallowed in organic viticulture.
Overused, modern synthetic chemical sprays will weaken and sicken the vine, and are generally perceived as a bad thing to be avoided when possible – and a necessary evil otherwise. All the producers we work with follow a copper-spray approach, at least in the first instance. Domaines that follow a strict organic regime found they had to use copper-based spray some 20 or more times this year to try and hold back the tide of mildew, whereas in a less challenging year they might only have to spray 10 times. But copper can also have long-term consequences for the soil, and its use is regulated. The maximum allowed is 7kg of copper spray per hectare in any given vintage, but no more than an average of 4kg per hectare per vintage measured over 7 years (with a view to protecting the long-term health of the soil). So winemakers who used the full permitted 7kg/hectare in 2024 (as many did) will need to rely on some upcoming dry vintages to require much less copper spray, in order to get their average down to 4kg/hectare.
Treating is a hard work regime. It is essential to spray quickly after rain, when mildew threatens. The vineyards are no respecter of weekends, and dedicated vineyard workers need to be on call at short notice. Romain Taupenot missed just one treatment in June, and in the aftermath lost 20% of his crop. And sometimes it was just impossible to get tractors into waterlogged vineyards.
Many top domaines follow a mostly organic approach, but are deliberately not certified. That meant that in the face of the 2024 vintage they were also able to use some modern chemical sprays, which meant they needed to use a lighter overall load of copper. The farming approach of resorting to modern synthetic chemicals only when necessary is referred to as lutte raisonnée (‘the reasoned fight’). Ghislaine Barthod, Mathilde Grivot and Jean-Nicolas Méo all told us they needed some recourse to modern chemicals in 2024. Jean-Nicolas Méo spoke for many when he asked if using some chemicals might be a lesser evil than saturating the soil with copper.
Not in a hundred years
We always like to ask winemakers if they can compare a current vintage to a past one. A lot of winemakers considered whether 2024 was similar to 2021, which was also very difficult in the vineyard, before dismissing the comparison. 2021 saw rain in summer and the wines are lighter, where 2024s are more concentrated. Some winemakers thought of 2013, when spring was also cold, but unlike 2024, in 2013 summer was never really that hot. 2013s sometimes err towards under-ripeness, but after the hot summer in 2024, 2024s have a ripe succulence at their core, which marries very nicely with the freshness from the cooler half of the season. On paper, 2012 seems like a good match, with a cool and wet spring, mildew pressure, a hot summer and low yields. But the hot summer of 2012 was troubled by storms and ripening was very uneven. Romain
Taupenot recalled green and ripe berries on the same bunch in 2012, which was not the case in 2024.
Frédéric Lafarge is a man with an encyclopedic memory for vintages, who is often able to find comparisons to vintages other winemakers have long forgotten about. Surely he would have a good answer for us. He told us that after much discussion, he had concluded that ‘you cannot easily compare 2024 to any vintage of the last 100 years’.
The final word
There won’t be huge volumes of 2024s to go around, but they are lovely wines in both colours. They have the freshness of the long, cool start to the growing season, a succulent core, and a level of concentration that comes from there being so few grapes left on the vines. They will be fabulous cellar wines and as some growers noted, they may take longer to come round than the warm, open-knit 2023s.
Wines will be offered in January. See you then?