wine report Jancis Robinson jan 2020

This week our main contributions to JancisRobinson.com have been our continuing deluge of tasting notes on 2018 burgundies – now approaching 1,500. Our tasting team of six Masters of Wine has been hard at work during the London Burgundy Fortnight that has just ended. We were busy all right, but it was a joy for Julia and me to be able to concentrate on no more than one tasting per day, however demanding those were. (Some merchants showed about 150 different wines; my picture is of just a small section of the wines shown by Lea & Sandeman at 67 Pall Mall.) It always seems, however, as though the London burgundy tastings are timed to coincide with peak cold and flu season.

You can access the most recent additions to our tasting notes database by clicking on the link at the very top of our guide to coverage of 2018 burgundy although be warned that our 15 alphabetically grouped tasting articles have not yet been copy-edited.

But we were also delighted to publish, free to all interested parties (who seemed to be numerous), Alder’s excellent, and revealing, account of therecent hearing in Washington DC about the proposed increase in US tariffs on European imports. It seems as though US government officials have only the haziest idea of how the US wine market operates. And found it hard to grasp why a wine drinker in the US might prefer champagne to an American sparkling wine. We have tried to keep on updating this article with further developments in this sorry saga.

We have also continued to update our article from the previous week aboutways to help Australian bushfire victims with the continuing terrible news from Down Under and of fresh fundraising initiatives. Tam’s wine of the week today highlights one of the most famous producers to have lost a vineyard in the recent Adelaide Hills bushfires, a Henschke Chardonnayfrom that benighted region. We encourage you to support the Australian wine industry by buying Australian whenever possible.

Because of Burgundy 2018, we have not published as many entirely new tasting articles as usual this week but we did publish my small Languedoc collection, including a report on a vertical of Katie Jones’s oldest Carignan, and a report of a retrospective tasting of Guffens and Verget wines back to the beginning – serious white burgundies, these.

On Tuesday, Elaine treated us to a comprehensive report on therehabilitation of Petite Sirah in California (known as Durif elsewhere, including in its homeland the Rhône Valley). On Wednesday, Arnica Rowan wrote about the interesting role that white truffles play in the ecosystem of Piemonte.

Thursday’s republication of an old article was Richard’s popular guide to label-recognition apps such as Vivino. He brought it up to date, but this did not entail much work as little has changed in this field recently, except that Vivino seems to have stopped trying to scrape our tasting notes database. Last Saturday I told the story of how Italian wine consultant Carlo Ferrini was converted to elegance in wines (much discussed on ourMembers’ forum) and Nick reviewed London’s hot new restaurant from the chef of New York’s Eleven Madison Park, Davies & Brook in Claridge’s hotel.

Tam’s last full book review is published today, of New York-based Austrian sommelier Aldo Sohm’s Wine Simple. Next week we’ll publish her brief guide to other relatively important wine books published last year, as well as the results of our competition to find ways to celebrate our twentieth anniversary – to be announced, appropriately enough, on 20 January.

Do keep visiting JancisRobinson.com. There's so much there that is free.