You’ll have to look hard, choose carefully and spend a ton to taste great 2021 white Burgundy. But when you do, you’ll be richly rewarded.

Welcome to 2021 in Burgundy! A year that produced wonderful wines that are nearly impossible to find. The uncooperative and increasingly concerning Burgundian weather meant low yields across the board—but the wines that did get made can be sensational. 

If you’re interested in what happened with the region’s red wines, take a look at our briefing here, but for now, let’s talk white with NWR Senior Editor and Master of Wine Christy Canterbury.

The headlines

• The 2021 whites from the Côte d’Or are awesome. Absolutely delicious, impressively concentrated, and really well balanced. 

• There’s just nothing to buy. Very little wine was made, and I suspect what you do find is going to be super expensive.

• The weather was a huge issue. Lots of insidious frost. Not enough sun. Rain at harvest time. Even in Chablis, where some vintners fared a bit better from a yield perspective, they made far less wine than normal.

What happened here?

• Chardonnay buds and turns into grapes before Pinot Noir. So when the big frost came in April, Chardonnay vines were at greater risk than Pinot Noir vines. Producers immediately lost a significant amount of their crop. In addition, hail (which hit the Côte Chalonnaise and Maconnais in mid-June) further reduced yields. 
• In the most prestigious areas—Puligny-Montrachet, Chassagne-Montrachet, and especially Meursault—very little fruit was left on the vine. But what fruit was left fared a bit better than Pinot Noir with regard to rot in the clusters. (Chardonnay has thicker skins and is less delicate.) 
• The impact of the weather was immense: Frédéric Barnier, head winemaker at Bouchard Père et Fils (which owns more vineyards than any other landholder in Meursault) told me that he had to go back 100 years in the winery’s records to see yields as low as 2021, which were down almost 90%. Franck Grux, head winemaker at Olivier Leflaive, made 230,000 bottles (almost all white) in 2021, down from 800,000 in a typical year. Pierre Vessigaud, based in Pouilly, said he was down 40% after the April frost, then 90% after the June hail, which is representative of the whole southern Burgundy region. 

Ugly weather, beautiful wines

• The Côte d’Or whites are absolutely dazzling. They’re super precise and concentrated. The vines put every last bit of effort they had into the few grapes that remained.
• It’s not to say they weren’t without problems. Some grapes were underripe, some were overripe, and the whole region saw quite a bit of disease. But the whites fared far better than the reds, and the best producers who managed vineyards thoughtfully did very well.
• The 2021s are unusually harmonious for such an early stage. Due to their concentration, the wines absorbed the new oak they were fermented and aged in extremely well. Many producers used less new oak, too. Often when you taste great wines in October/November, you can see where they’re headed, but also you can taste that the oak needs time to integrate. But in this case, many of these 2021s were already fabulous. 
• That concentration also means these wines will age for a long time. These aren’t delicate flowers that’ll keel over. In contrast to the reds, which are pretty now but won’t last as long, these have real aging potential: 20-30 years for Grand Cru; 10-20 for Premier Cru.
• A few producers who stood out: Domaine de la Vougeraie made stunning white wines. Domaine des Comtes Lafon’s Montrachet is brilliant, as usual. Jérôme Flous at Domaine Faiveley and Benoît Riffault at Domaine Etienne Sauzet made fabulous whites. Céline at Fontaine-Gagnard made scintillating whites blazing with energy, by far the best wines I’ve ever had from the domaine. 

Get ready to look hard and pay a lot 

• We’re not seeing much 2021 out there at all. For some of the big negociants with lots of global demand for their stock, like Louis Jadot, they’re already releasing some of their 2022s. 
• There’s probably no value within this vintage. I’d look to 2018, 2019, and 2020 where there’s a little more value, especially as retailers start to off-load them to make room for new vintages. Or wait until 2022, which will have a lot more wine–enough that you might be able to find some reasonably priced bottles. Finding values among the 2022 vintage will depend a lot on how the 2023 growing season shapes up—if yields are looking good, prices on 2022s may relax.

Chablis: slightly better yields, depending on vineyard location, worse wine

• 2021 was a return to lighter, brighter, more classically-styled wines from Chablis. 
• This year was not, however, as good for Chablis as the Côte d’Or. Those grapes just didn’t quite get as ripe, so alcohol levels were low as a result. Domaine Laroche’s lineup was 11.8-12.5% ABV, including the Grand Crus, which usually sit at 13%. Fabien Moreau at Domaine Christian Moreau chaptalized—meaning he (legally) added sugar, a practice common in cool years—almost everything he made for the first time since 2007. He wasn’t alone. 
• Some of the Chablis wines also aren’t quite as clean. They’re not bad, they’re just not as precise and crystal clear. They’re a bit like eating less ripe or out-of-season fruit. 
• Most Chablis wine from 2021 won’t be long-lived, but the very best will age well thanks to low pH and high acidity. Look for William Fèvre, Billaud-Simon, Jean-Paul et Benoît Droin, Louis Moreau, Pinson and, of course, Raveneau and Vincent Dauvissat among others.
• I’d mostly look for wines from Chablis’s right bank—they had larger yields in this vintage, so they might be easier to find and slightly more reasonably priced. Unusually, some of the smallest quantities made were in the Petit Chablis and Chablis categories. The frost gutted these vineyards in a way that it never had before. 
• The worries didn’t abate after the spring. I was in Chablis the week before harvest began, and you could tell the winemakers were anxious because it was overcast, their grapes weren’t yet ripe, and they knew rain was coming right when they expected to harvest. Many were stuck: if you harvest before the rain, the grapes aren’t ripe enough; harvest after, they’re stuffed with water and have less concentration. On top of that, even high-end producers were forced into action due to humidity. Many producers said their grapes were under-ripe yet rotting right before harvest. So it was a bit of a no-win situation. 
• There were some unusual entrants in my top Chablis producers this year due to the particular conditions of the vintage. Adrien Michaut at Domaine de la Motte crushed it, for example. His wines are always good, but in 2021 they are great. And because of his windier, high-elevation location that keeps disease at bay, Adrien actually had excellent yields!

2022 will be better, but the trends are ominous

• These climate change-related weather problems are now becoming patterns. More and more frequently, the vines are starting to grow in February, not in April. So then buds show up early and get hammered by frost. Which, in turn, means yields are terrible. 15, 20, 30 years ago, vines wouldn’t have started growing and budding so early, so the frost wouldn’t have hurt them as much. 
• People are now talking a lot about whether it’s even cost effective to try to fight frost. You can’t protect everything. Some folks just shrug it off and chalk it up to a bad year. But this isn’t an anomaly anymore. Next year could be bad, too.
• 2022 was a much-needed good year for yields. You can sense the relief among everybody in Burgundy. The yields aren’t totally fantastic, but there will be a lot more 2022 to go around.