Jancis Robinson Nov. 13, 2020

Dear wine lover

What a busy week!

We followed up last week’s 16 videos with 18 more, one from each of our shortlisted sustainable wine producers, comprising another trip around the world like last week’s collection of short films from each of our editorial team. To find any video, just click on the new Videos link on our horizontal menu along the top of any page of JancisRobinson.com. All of these free videos, by the way, are designed to celebrate our 20th anniversary this month.

One thing I did this week was update our Where to find us section. For the last few months it has said simply, ‘mainly at home, possibly until vaccinated’ but I thought I should add the various online events I have agreed to participate in and was rather surprised to see there are so many of them. One is particularly appropriate in view of our sustainability theme. One of the external judges in our 2020 writing competition, Tobias Webb of www.sustainablewine.co.uk, is organising theFuture of Wine Forum2020 on 26 and 27 November. It’s free to join; just sign up at www.futurewineforum.com. Participants include me and more than 50 other speakers, including CEOs of some of the world’s biggest wine companies and some of the smaller sustainable wine producers too. Questions are welcome; issues could hardly be more important.

Probably the most significant addition to the site this week – though I say it myself – was my series of four articles on burgundy 2019s, an overview and three sets of tasting notes grouped alphabetically by producer. There has been very little coverage of the latest vintage so far, certainly very few tasting notes, so I hope that you find my observations useful. The good news is that although the smartest burgundies are nowadays unthinkably expensive, I found many delicious 2019s from much more affordable appellations. See some specific recommendations a week tomorrow. We also published the start of a guide to our coverage of 2019 burgundy but there is much more to add to judge from the roster of tastings in London. We plan to add a tasting article for each of these tastings to supplement my tasting notes taken at 23 of the finest domaines. This week’s picture is the view from our bathroom in Morey-St-Denis last month up towards its (unaffordable) grands crus.

The only other tasting article was a survey of wines from Brooks of Oregon, to go with the first of our sustainable producer videos, which is presented by Pascal Brooks, co-winner of this year’s writing competition.

On Saturday I outlined the Grenache/Garnacha revolution and even suggested that some examples would make less-expensive alternatives to red burgundy, heretical as that may seem. Nick considered from the hospitality industry’s point of view the second lockdown so many of us in Europe are currently experiencing.

We published two vintage reports, Douro 2020 and Minervois 2020, and republished Sarah Phillips’ look at the Virginia wine scene since the nearby White House is still not far from our thoughts. And the article that fascinated me most this week is Matthew Hayes’ hard-hitting insider look at the world of fine-wine trading, a response to last week’s encomium to investing in burgundy from Ian Mill QC.

Today it’s all Tam: the next collection of her incisive and unrivalled book reviews, this week’s theme being politics and piety, and her wine of the week, a completely delicious madeira.

Stay safe,