Jancis Robinson News 13 Jan 2017

Dear wine lover

Julia, Richard and I have spent the week commuting between a total of 23 tastings in London, trying to supply you with as many tasting notes as possible on the luscious red and white 2015 burgundies. (My picture is of the superlative Goedhuis tasting in the Philip Mould gallery on Monday, coinciding with a crippling tube strike.)

Thanks to much drier work on the part of Tam and her auxiliary uploaders, including Emily Percival, Camilla Sellars, Julia and Richard, we already had a total of more than 1,000 burgundy 2015 tasting notes by Wednesday night and there will doubtless be far more by the time you read this. As we explain in this guide to our coverage, this year tasting notes are being added to each of our 15 tasting articles as they come in so that you can easily identify the most recent additions – which is why they look rather untamed below.

Once all the tasting notes have been uploaded, we will neaten up the tasting articles and sort the tasting notes alphabetically by producer as usual, but for the moment we encourage members to use our new feature that allows them to choose how tasting notes are sorted and then to revert to the default order. We hope all this is helpful and would welcome feedback.

We’ve also been publishing more entries in our wine writing competition and will continue to do so. Apologies that it is taking so long, but this is all for the good reason that there have been so many excellent entries.

Elaine brought us up to date on the storms currently devastating California while Walter reported in detail on the 2016 vintage throughout Italy. Richard emptied his spittoon again and, amazingly, it did not contain burgundy. He also completed his survey of the current Australian wine scene with a summary of what the famous Wine Research Institute in Adelaide is up to. We reprised some of Tam’s book reviews, including her views on biodynamics, and Nick reviewed an interesting new restaurant in SoHo, New York.

Burgundy 2015 was also the theme of my article last Saturday and today’s wine of the week. I’m afraid there is no escape, but this really is an exceptional vintage. We try to help you sniff out the value.

Happy Friday the 13th,