There’s a steep bill to be paid for quality and reliability, corner stones of successful wine. This may be the moment to mention a simple technique which been instrumental achieving this. Selection. Stick with me – think squirrels in the Willy Wonka chocolate factory sorting nuts. Now visualise a vibrating conveyor belt outside the winery. The grapes are harvested and popped onto the table where they move slowly along with at least six workers scrutinising their appearance, picking out bunches and clipping off berries which don’t come up to snuff.

What’s a bad vintage for a grower in Burgundy? Rot’ll do it – something which furs the grapes with boring regularity in a climate where rain and humidity are common. Hail is also a big problem, particularly for the Côte de Beaune reds…the vines of Volnay, Pommard and Beaune suffered the lashes of hail from 2012 for three vintages on the trot. The saving grace was the timing. When hail strikes early in the season, the affected berries will shrivel and that which does not fall in the vineyard can be shaken away on the vibrating table leaving no trace of goût de grêle. It was nigh impossible to make good wine in such vintages before the vibrating wonder-belt. Dried berries, leaves and insects – ladybirds leave a particularly unpleasant green taste – are shaken and drop through the gaps in the belt. Only top notch bunches or grapes are allowed into the vat.

This selection table or table de tries is a no-brainer. A simple approach which has revolutionised quality. But, and here’s the rub, squirrel labour doesn’t come cheap and you make less vino – a good deal less in a year with lots of rot. What’s more, the the quality conscious domains use this on their lowliest wines, not just the premier and grand cru, so no wonder these wines have increased in price.

And get this – the table is the low tech end of things. Some domaines, including Tollot-Beaut in Chorey-Lès-Beaune, have ploughed profits into expensive optical sorting machines (E90,000-150,000) which scrutinise individual berries with an optical eye, digitally photographing thousands per second and blasting away those found imperfect – it’s nuts… well no it’s grapes, but seriously, at the best domaines there is no such thing as a bad vintage, just a very small one where a large part of the harvest is binned and only the best squirrelled away to the winery.

For more about Burgundy go to my website The Burgundy Briefing. In 2015, the current vintage, there was very little need for the sorting table as the fruit was remarkably healthy – a rare event indeed.
The Burgundy Briefings & The Burgundy Briefing films