originally posted by Claude Kolm:
originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Claude Kolm:
Every vintage in Burgundy these days has lots of really good wines (well, 2008 wouldn't have had the north winds not come in 2008). It's better to think of the styles of the vintages than to try to construct a ranking of which vintage is "better" than which other vintages.
While I totally agree, and have also been around to know that even excellent vintages have their failures two critics whom I hold in fair regard have said that 2005 is the strongest vintage across the board they have ever seen.
Now, I don't really care about this except it makes wines I usually buy, in this case Mugneret, prohibitively expensive so that I don't own any.
I think the idea is that you could buy broadly and expect very good results in the cellar.
My experience leaves me with no reason to doubt this, but I didn't practice it myself.
2005 is strong across the board so that if you're buying blind, arguably you do better in 2005 than in other vintages.* OTOH, if your're buying Burgundy blindly, you shouldn't be buying Burgundy. And at Nuits-St-Georges, to choose one example, the wines are clearly superior in 2006 to 2005 -- virtually** every one that I can think of.
* I think a strong case can be made, though, that 1999 is even more regular across the board; however it may well be that there will prove to be more very great wines in 2005 than in 1999 -- but you'll have to wait a lot longer for them.
** "Virtually" is just to cover my ass; off the top of my head, I can't think of any exceptions, certainly not for the Prmeaux and Nuits sectors.