I want to take you back to the end of August. We were nervous. Talk around us was that yet again, harvesting in Bordeaux was beginning at the earliest dates ever recorded. We walked around our vineyards nervously checking the state of the vine leaves; noticing the cracks in the parched soil; consulting again and again all the different weather apps we had on our telephones. Absolutely not necessary to check our rain monitors; they had been dry for months.

My most recent visit to Burgundy took place during the week of the annual Hospices de Beaune auction, although I got out of town before the gavel went down.  All week, there had been a frenzied excitement brewing in the bourgeois streets of Beaune; press and trade were whispering under their breaths that prices would be astronomical; that this year it would be the négociants not the producers who would be buying the Hospices barrels and that the results of the sale would affect the future of Burgundy wines for the next few years...

2020 will always be known as the third year in a great trilogy of vintages 2018-2019-2020 in Bordeaux. Yet the story behind the 2020s is much more interesting than just wonderful quality...