Wine nerds and collectors are an obsessive lot, and, for many, this obsessiveness focuses most squarely on vintage. Opinions about producers or appellations, villages or vineyards can run hot, but these preferences are less binary and more personal. Vintage, on the other hand, tends to be the first and thus the determining criteria for interest in a wine or region. 

​​Part of this stems from the term “classic vintage.” Prior to our warming age, calling a vintage “classic” landed as an endorsement of exceptional quality. Full ripeness, strong structural support, and the positive integration of these have, for much of history, guided collective conceptions of quality and cellaring upside. The term “classic” has long served as the pithiest way to express this formula. 

But in our warming age, classic has assumed a different meaning. We now reserve “classic” for those vintages we perceive to be stylistically in line with historical (i.e. cooler) norms. When a modern critic describes a new vintage as classic, she invariably references a cool growing season and the relatively firm, high-acid wines that result. This distinction between historical usage and modern usage is crucial. To say something is classic in any other context—cars, movies, music—strongly implies high quality. But our new and narrowing definition of classic conflates cool-vintage style and high quality, to the point where any distinction between the two tends to disappear entirely. 

Red Burgundy vintages like 2008 and 2014—each cool growing seasons producing relatively lean and high-acid wines—have been and continue to be viewed positively, particularly as ideal vintages for terroir expression. (I’ll use red Burgundy as a stand-in for this new thinking around vintages, because it’s the most scrutinized and collected wine region, and it’s one particularly susceptible to this kind of “classic” thinking.) Yet as these vintages age, most of their wines already display an unpleasant angularity and too little fruit to be genuinely interesting. Whether terroir remains apparent in such wines is arguable. Whether they are actually fun to drink, well, that’s easy to doubt. Rather than the inherently positive connotations of “classic,” my own experience more often recruits such descriptors as hard, austere, lean, and underfruited.

In contrast, wines from riper recent vintages like 2016 and 2019 quite often retain plenty of fresh energy while also achieving a fuller and more gratifying background of fruit and unique-to-site complexity. Today such vintages tend to be disqualified from serious critical and consumer interest on the basis of insufficient hang times, early harvests, too few degree days, or “problematic” pH. “I don’t like [insert warm vintage], I only drink classic vintages” is a refrain I hear today as often as “How dry is this Sancerre?” “Classic,” in this formulation, reveals considerably more about modern attitudes than the wines it aims to clarify. 

1947 and 1959, two very warm vintages in Burgundy, shortlist any credible survey of the 20th century’s strongest. Each produced unusually full-bodied, fleshy wines, yet both found easy grouping with the region’s classic—meaning “benchmark”— vintages. Again, the quality of a particular vintage and that vintage’s shape and style were, back then, viewed as entirely separate. Whether one prefers the style of, say, 1966 or 1978—two cooler vintages that produced high quality wines—was a litmus test for personal taste rather than vintages in and of themselves.

Historically, winemaking adapted to cooler growing seasons, rather than adapting to heat as they must today. Over the past three decades, contemporary producers have developed extraordinary skill in rendering warmer vintages into harmonious wines. Many white Burgundy producers, for example, have increasingly looked to reductive winemaking techniques to tighten and tone their wines’ consistently fuller textures. We now regularly encounter white Burgundies of admirable symmetry and poise from ripe and even ultra-ripe vintages. 

2018 provides a useful example. A subset of this vintage’s whites, virtually all from reductive producers, number with my favorite whites produced in Burgundy in the 2010 decade. Despite that growing season’s early harvest and heat spikes, domaines such as Pierre Girardin, Antoine Jobard, Rémi Jobard, Roulot, Fichet, and Frédéric Cossard (among many others) produced superbly intense and vital 2018s. Beneath the obvious hedonism these wines remain superbly site-expressive. 

In the vineyards, equally adaptive strides have been made. Canopy management has become far more sophisticated and harvest dates more precisely calibrated. Crop sizes are skillfully manipulated across a growing season in order to pinpoint ripeness. The quality of warm red Burgundy vintages like 2018, 2019, and 2020 would simply have not been possible even 15 years ago. Savvy consumers are well advised to remain open-minded in their purchasing strategy during such hot vintages—wherever possible, unbiased tasting deserves at least as much credibility as a survey of a growing season’s heat spikes. 

Reassigning a purely qualitative meaning to the term classic would prove useful. In doing so, we relieve “cool” from the burden of signifying “good,” whenever that word appears in serious wine conversations. We would also then be freer to enjoy the scores of fascinating wines that are the product of sunnier and shorter seasons than those navigated by our forbearers. Labels, in the end, are limiting. Earned opinions are the more gratifying portion of wine-loving life. Tyranny happens when belief is transformed into truth. A willingness to reevaluate modern attitudes about the relationship between wine style and wine quality might well provide liberation from the tyranny of labeling—for wines and even for ourselves.

UNDERRATED (READ: "NOT CLASSIC”) RECENT BURGUNDY VINTAGES

2018 (White)

A classic (sorry) example of a vintage where weather data—heat accumulation, rainfall—does not align with in-bottle results. At least not with the vintage’s strongest subset, a group that’s produced some of my favorite white Burgundies of the last decade.  

The best 2018s emerge from producers consciously aiming for reductive results. Not all vintages lend equally to reduction (this a complex issue; space constraints forbid a discussion of it). But 2018, for whatever reason(s), was born for reduction. Successful addresses this year could stunt-double as a list of Burgundy’s best reductive domaines: Pierre Girardin, Roulot, Antoine Jobard, Rémi Jobard, Niellon, Cossard.  

These wines share 2018’s solar charm, along with the intense inward pull of high-quality reduction. As a group they illustrate the best definition of reduction I know: an aromatic sensation that intensely concentrates energy toward the middle of a wine. Non-reductive 2018s spill outward, usually boringly. The best reductive examples concentrate energy into Chardonnay supernovas.  

Early reports of 2018 whites as top-heavy have always limited their collector appeal. In the end generous yields saved the vintage: a crop the size of 2016 or 2021 would have been a disaster. Instead, here’s the happiest surprise in many years. This is not a vintage for dart throwing, but careful choices richly reward.

2019 (Red)

Ever since going into barrel, the 2019 red Burgundy vintage has been defined by the special simultaneity of energy and substance. The wines taste like rich cool-vintage wines or fresh warm-vintage wines, whichever you prefer. Either path drops us at almost bizarrely complete and compelling wines.

Fruit profiles are unusually red-spectrumed for such a warm growing season. Even overtly ripe wines cling to cherries like a life raft in the ocean. Size, yes. Hedonism, lots. Too-muchness, though? Rarely. 

Textures are softer than 2018 or 2020—two other recent warm Burgundy vintages to which 2019 is often compared. 2019s also have a seamlessness that accounts for much of this crop’s uber-drinkability. A sound buying strategy is this: snap up, now, what remains in the retail market.