The 2023 vintage was rare for Burgundy – offering both quantity and quality. But it isn’t quite that simple, with an atypical growing season, almost too much fruit, and a less homogenous crop. We report on the vintage and its wines – the best of which are remarkable

The 2023 vintage was rare for Burgundy – offering both quantity and quality. We report on the growing season and the wines it produced

Burgundy 2023 vintage overview

Burgundy 2023: vintage overview

Our team spent several weeks exploring the 2023 vintage in Burgundy – visiting, tasting and talking to a range of producers up and down the Côte d’Or. Here, we offer a run-down of the year by producer, from north to south, reporting on how each fared and our pick of their range this year

A run-down of the Burgundy 2023 vintage wines en primeur by producer: from Fourrier to Lafon via Bernstein, Lamarche, Lambrays, Duroche and Hudelot-Noellat 

Burgundy 2023 vintage by producer 

Burgundy 2023: by producer

The air is cool and crisp, with the radiant blue skies that only late winter can provide. On the crest of the hill in front of me, a troupe is studiously pruning Ch. Lafite Rothschild’s oldest Cabernet Sauvignon vines, their roots sinking deep into the precious gravel soils that define the First Growth’s wines. Looking over a junior member of the team’s shoulder is Luís Pinto, making sure that no mistakes are being made as they shape the vines for the future, laying the groundwork for not just 2024, but the vintages beyond that. Sporting navy-blue Domaines Barons de Rothschild overalls (vintage, sadly out of production and unavailable for purchase – I asked), Pinto has been working at the estate for over 30 years, and now leads one of the vineyard teams. As you might guess given his name, his family is Portuguese, although he was born and raised in Bordeaux. In fact, his mother even worked the harvest at Lafite, and Pinto has pictures of himself as a child at the on-site nursery the château then had for workers’ offspring – perhaps sewing the first seeds of his future profession. As Louis Caillard, Vineyard Manager at Ch. Lafite Rothschild and Ch. Duhart-Milon, explains, Pinto isn’t an anomaly. Caillard heads up the 80-strong team which works across both properties (and are managed identically when it comes to the vines). The vast majority of this team are extremely local, coming from within a 20-kilometre radius of the château, and once they join the team, few ever leave. Much has changed over Pinto’s many years working these vines – offering an on-the-ground view of viticultural trends. He remembers a time when they would rip out hedges and trees to make room for vines, focused more on yield, now coming full-circle to reinstate the biodiversity that existed before. Today there’s more appreciation of the craft and calling of a vigneron, or vine-grower – a return to traditional vineyard management.  Looking at pruning, for example, Pinto explains how there are no set rules: “Each person prunes a vine as they wish,” he tells me. They respond to each vine, its needs, looking at the sap flow and thinking about its long-term future, rather than just the next season. It’s very Simonit&Sirch in approach – although Pinto is bemused by such a suggestion; for him, it’s how he learnt to understand vines. “All it is, effectively, is that we think,” says Caillard. “It’s always existed; it’s just that we had forgotten it a little.” The challenge is teaching this sort of instinctive approach to managing a vineyard. “I don’t follow a recipe anymore,” says Pinto. It’s not just knowledge he is trying to pass on to his team, but “a way of thinking”, he says, one that inevitably comes from experience, from making mistakes and learning from them. There’s a drastic difference between studying the theory from a book, and standing in front of a vine, secateurs in hand. Of course, the idea of making mistakes when the wine commands the reputation (and price) that Lafite does might seem daunting – but it’s this that sets top addresses apart. Lafite’s scrupulous approach to quality, declassifying any fruit that doesn’t meet its very high standards, is a luxury that not all producers can afford. For Pinto, it’s this dedication to quality and long-term view that has kept him at Lafite all these years. There are plenty of properties that will rip vines out once they reach a certain age, all in the name for better crop loads, but at Lafite, the philosophy is to see “how far we can take the vine”, nurturing parcels into old age. His work might be cyclic, following the vine’s yearly progression, but there are changes every year – an effort to constantly evolve and improve. This, perhaps, is what – for me – is most interesting about Lafite. It’s not just the finesse and elegance of its pinpoint Grand Vin that sets this estate apart, but the way in which it has quietly been changing the way Bordeaux works, pushing forward in its pursuit of excellence. For over a decade, they’ve had Manuela Brando leading their Research & Development; talking to her is fascinating, with trials on everything from biodynamics, rootstocks and treatments to umbrella-like covers as an alternative way to combat mildew. If successful, these trials are transferred to the wider vineyard – with training that means the team never stops learning. Just the other day, Pinto tells me, they had a session on agroforestry – something that he’s clearly fascinated by. Pinto seems relaxed, joking lightly with us, but is also quietly serious when it comes to his work, knowing that every decision they make in the vineyard is critical to the quality of the wine that eventually emerges from the cellar. “Every decision has an impact,” echoes Caillard – “and, in fact, nothing is simple.” Difficult it might be, but Pinto is pleased with the progression he has seen over the years. “You can feel the terroir a bit more again,” he says. The shift to organic, re-introduction of hedgerows and trees to the vineyard, which in turn has brought an array of fauna – butterflies and ladybirds, for example, has transformed the property. As an apiarist, he’s acutely aware of the wildflowers that now blossom and abundant bees they attract. At the end of the day, however, there’s no wizardry, he suggests, to what they do – it’s simple: “We respect the vines a bit more.” With the gloss of an estate like Lafite, a First Growth whose reputation is so immense, it’s easy to forget the work that happens behind the scenes. But, as Caillard knows all too well, “You cannot achieve anything technical without the people; people are key to everything we do.” People like Pinto, so clearly at one with their calling, the place and vines, are what make truly great wine – separating the excellent and exceptional. As our conversation draws to a close, Pinto returns back to his team, his stocky frame receding down the row of vines and weathered face turned once more to the bright sunshine, as deeply rooted in this terroir as the Cabernet Sauvignon that surrounds him. Browse all current listings of Ch. Lafite Rothschild, or read more about Bordeaux

As we continue to take you behind the scenes at Bordeaux’s top addresses, our latest feature shines a light on Ch. Lafite Rothschild. We caught up with one of its vineyard team, a vigneron who has dedicated over 30 years of his life to the First Growth’s vines

Taking you behind the scenes at Ch. Lafite Rothschild to talk to one of the Bordeaux First Growth’s vineyard workers

The call of the vine – Ch. Lafite Rothschild

The call of the vine: Ch. Lafite Rothschild

Ch. Belle-Brise is a rather inconspicuous Bordeaux property with a “garden” vineyard of just two hectares and an annual production of just 800 cases. With such small quantities produced and a legion of loyal followers, the wine is little known outside of an exclusive list of top restaurateurs, a few lucky distributors and their clients. Henri-Bruno is the 20th generation of the de Coincy family, famous for their Armagnac production that dates back an incredible 700 years. Despite this impressive lineage, Henri-Bruno's winemaking skills are a much more recent labour of love. Similarly, Ch. Belle-Brise was late to commercial winemaking – an enterprise started by Henri-Bruno when he bought the property in 1991 – despite producing wine since the 18th century. Ch. Belle-Brise is often compared to the Grand Crus of Burgundy and has been referred to as the "Musigny of Pomerol", such is the elegance and weightless power this wine consistently seems to possess. Theories abound about why this is the case. Perhaps it is Henri-Bruno's  Burgundian wife's influence, or the pre-1956 vines, or small-scale operation? For De Coincy, it is all of the above that makes this little wine of Pomerol so unique. The foundations of Ch. Belle-Brise What is really special about the Belle-Brise vineyard is the age of the vines, more than 100 vines are a staggering 120 years old and the average vine age is around 70 years old.   It is rare to find any Pomerol vines that pre-date 1956, as devastating frosts that year destroyed virtually all the region's vineyards. Many vines planted in Pomerol post-1956 were reliable clones but not as good in terms of wine quality. This is not the case at Belle-Brise, where vines either pre-date 1956 or were propagated from the surviving old vines. Outside of Belle-Brise, there are just a few pre-1956 vines dotted around Pomerol and Saint-Emilion – most noticeably at Ch. Lafleur and Ch. Ausone. Old Cabernet Franc and Merlot vines, De Coincy believes, create an overall elegance, finesse and depth of flavour on the palate that is something really special. The Belle-Brise vineyard contains a split of around 80% Merlot and 20% Cabernet Franc. The soil has gravel on the surface and beneath, a layer of clay, chalk and crasse de fer (iron rich bands of sand that play an important role in the flavour characteristics of many top Pomerol wines). Many believe this is responsible for the truffle aromas commonly found in Pomerol wines. Others believe it provides viticultural benefits, limiting vigour and excessive leaf growth, in turn producing smaller concentrated berries. Natural winemaking at Ch. Belle-Brise Despite being an experienced Brandy producer, De Coincy's project in Pomerol required considerable learning on the job and was faced with a challenging start. His first crop in the 1991 vintage was largely decimated by frost, meaning he had very small quantities to work with and likely not enough to sell. This did, however, mean he was able to experiment with the vintage and trial different approaches. Three very challenging Bordeaux vintages followed as Mother Nature threw everything at De Coincy. It was a steep learning curve. When the more successful 1995 and 1996 vintages arrived, the winemaker was ready to produce Belle-Brise in his style, with confidence. The approach is artisan and natural. There is no electricity on site and everything is made much as it would have been centuries prior. The grapes are grown using biodynamic and organic principles, and De Coincy employs horses to work the vines. The grapes are all harvested within one day allowing pin-point accuracy on picking dates. They are then hand-sorted exclusively by women – something de Coincy is insistent upon. Once picked and sorted, the grapes are then left uncrushed in concrete vats in the winery. De Coincy then closes up the cellar and leaves the grapes for five days, so the natural coolness of the cellar retards the fermentation process. After five days, De Coincy returns to open up the cellar. As the heat of the day enters the cellar, the grapes naturally begin to ferment from natural yeasts. De Coincy tends to pump over the juice twice a day over six to 10 days depending on the vintage and then leaves the wine to settle in-tank prior to the pressing of the skins. This traditional method is not very common in modern winemaking as it can run the risk of contamination. De Coincy, however, believes this method helps extract the delicate aromatics from the wine. After this stage, De Coincy carries out a very slow pressing of the skins using an old manual vertical process, which he believes is another vital element in the process that retains a delicate finesse typically found in Belle-Brise. Many of these methods are not possible in larger estates as they are laborious and manual. The Belle-Brise wines are then matured in large 400-litre barrels (one-third new, one-third one-year-old, one-third two-year-old), eschewing smaller barriques which De Coincy feels has too strong an affectation on the wine. The Ch. Belle-Brise drinking window Ch. Belle-Brise has always been a fairly accessible wine in its youth with its compact but soft tannins already beautifully integrated. For De Coincy, Belle-Brise needs five years maturation in bottle before you can really benefit from the full impact of the wine and then, depending on your tastes, it drinks beautifully over the next decade. De Coincy has often served his wine blind to his restaurateur clients and found it has been mistaken for premium Burgundy. The similarity with Grand Cru Burgundy is difficult to fathom, considering the completely different varieties and different climates, yet Belle-Brise does boast the silkiness, finesse and almost weightless power of Grand Cru Burgundy, with a touch more opulence you expect from Pomerol. Ch. Belle-Brise's rarity With a mere two-hectare walled -garden vineyard, production at Belle-Brise is minuscule, making it one of the rarest wines on today's marketplace. The vast majority of liquid never reaches private clients as it is snapped up by some of France's finest three-Michelin-starred restaurants. In fact, 80% of three-star-Michelin restaurants in France (and 25 other countries) list the wine, including Georges Blanc and Alain Ducasse: Le Louis XV. Beyond these locations,  private clients can only source Belle-Brise through FINE+RARE and Vinfolio. Browse all currently available Ch. Belle-Brise vintages, exclusively available through FINE+RARE & Vinfolio, or read more Editorial

We caught up with Ch. Belle-Brise's owner and winemaker Henri-Bruno de Coincy to find out the secret behind this idiosyncratic Pomerol estate  

Ch. Belle-Brise's owner and winemaker Henri-Bruno de Coincy on the secret behind this idiosyncratic Pomerol estate  

Ch. Belle-Brise idiosyncratic Pomerol wines

Ch. Belle-Brise: talking to Henri-Bruno de Coincy

I am too disorganised to call myself a collector, but I often find myself thinking about the multiple meanings of collecting. I have a room full of books left unread from one year to the next, whose mute reproach I feel every time I am in their presence. I have half a dozen radios, from Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper’s folding Brionvega TS502 to a Danish-made Beolit 707 from Bang & Olufsen, with its slide rule tuning device. I have a manual typewriter.  Most of us accumulate such random clutter. These were never possessions that were primarily about being useful – the Brionvega and the Beolit have long since been supplanted by a bluetooth speaker and a smartphone. They represent my membership of the design tribe.  The books carry other layers of meaning. My five years at university are on one shelf. The traces of the eight years I have spent writing a just-completed biography of Boris Iofan – Josef Stalin’s preferred architect – are spelled out in the titles of the books on another shelf. The typewriter was inherited from my father and it serves to remind me of childhood. The closest that I come to having a collection that a serious collector might acknowledge is in my chairs: a Rover chair that Ron Arad salvaged from a car, a Gio Ponti Superlegera, an Eames Lounger, a Harry Bertoia, George Sowden’s Palace chair from the 1983 Memphis collection and a deconstructed armchair designed by Rei Kawakubo. On a larger or smaller scale, humans develop complex relationships with their possessions that can go from the professionalism of full-blown collecting, to the casual significance of a row of junk shop finds on a mantlepiece. They can tell us a lot about ourselves. Marina Warner’s guide to the house in Hampstead, now run as a museum, in which Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life, offers an arresting insight into the significance that collecting had for him. She describes the ranks of ancient bronze, ceramic and marble figures parading across the desk that Freud brought with him to London from Vienna where he no longer felt safe due to Nazi occupation in 1938. Certainly, they are beautiful, and mostly they are precious. Thanks to their association with Freud, even the few that have been established as 20th-century forgeries will have become valuable. Some are almost 4,000 years old and reflect the religious and political practices of the distant past. Others, such as Freud’s art deco cigar case, come less freighted with history. But as Warner says, “they were also tools of thought, the kitchen utensils of his imagination”.   The batterie de cuisine of psychoanalysis included Egyptian coffin masks from the Roman period, Chinese jade and gold brooches, Roman glass, a 2,500-year-old sphinx, sarcophagus lids, Babylonian cylinder seals and Egyptian heart scarabs, as well as a 19th-century neck rest from New Guinea, modern metal porcupines, and Balinese figures. The pieces in pride of place on his desk, placed in apparently random order, were his special favourites, a tiny fraction of his collection that had become permanent fixtures. From time to time, Freud made space for a few new acquisitions to get a look in. “A collection to which there are no new additions is really dead,” he told his biographer Ernest Jones. After a short interval, most of the new things would be moved into the glass-fronted cabinets positioned around his study, where they were placed in more organised groups than those standing on his desk. Greek sculptures went on a shelf together. A cluster of representations of the Egyptian god Horus were grouped on another.  In Freud’s lifetime, the collection was continually changing. Before his move to London, he toured Vienna’s antiquities dealers almost every week on the look-out for new finds. He was ready to exchange pieces for items he could not afford to buy, and was generous in gifting pieces to friends and pupils he thought would appreciate them. Freud also had no qualms about buying items that came on the market in questionable circumstances, in particular, from the unofficial excavations (sometime after 1906) at a Roman fort in Hungary.   Despite the important part it played in his life, Freud wrote very little about collecting. The nearest that he came to spelling out what drove his interest in fragments of ancient sculpture, was when he compared his own exploration of the unconscious minds of his patients to an archaeological excavation of an ancient city. “The psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures.”  Freud was known to share his dining table with choice specimens to act as companions during a meal. “I must always have an object to love”, he confessed to his colleague and rival Carl Jung. When he was writing his book The Interpretation of Dreams in 1895, Freud spent the summer at Schloss Bellevue outside Vienna. He took a selection of what he called “my old grubby gods who take part in the works as paperweights for the manuscripts” with him.  Before Freud left Austria for England in 1938, his desk, his consulting room, and his study at Berggasse 19 were photographed by Edmund Engelman. Engelman’s 150 images helped Freud’s architect son Ernst to transpose the desk and its contents from a dark back room in a Viennese apartment to a sunlit Hampstead villa.  Like most collectors, Freud could never limit himself to a single field. Ronald Lauder the former MoMA chairman, for example, is known for the collection of Viennese modernism that forms the basis for his own museum, the Neue Galerie in New York. He also collects (in depth) in 15 other fields with little apparent connection between them. Lauder is fascinated by the work of the Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata. He has a collection of arms and armour going back to The Crusades, and another of World War Two memorabilia. He owns some of Egon Schiele’s finest works, as well as various 18th-century French artworks. Fellow collector Rolf Fehlbaum (head of Vitra) has one of the largest collections of modern chairs in the world, and gave Frank Gehry his first European commission to design a gallery for it, but he is equally fascinated by toy robots manufactured in Japan since 1937. He calls them tiny kinetic sculptures. Where possible, he acquires their original packaging too. Perhaps the best way to understand the psychology of collecting is to see it as a spectrum. At one end, it is about order and control. In a messy and uncontrollable universe, a collection offers at least a semblance of certainty. A collection of this kind is based on provenance, completeness and authenticity. An over-restored vintage Bugatti is less desirable to a collector than one in original condition.  Every previous owner, every detail of its making forms part of its record. A red Olivetti typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass that once belonged to David Bowie was sold at Sotheby’s for US$65,000. You can buy one (that hasn’t been owned by Bowie) for US$750, which is still a lot of money for a piece of obsolete technology. Some collectors attempt to make patterns from the things that they acquire or, like jigsaw puzzlers, set out to complete a picture by locating every piece of a set. Some try to document the evolution of a species whether the subject of their interest is biscuit tins or the eggs of a particular type of bird. Some forms of collecting require the active engagement of the collector. Wildflowers need to be picked and dried quickly before they are pressed into a book. Butterfly collectors used macabre methods such as poison jars, or squeezing the thorax, to dispatch their prey without causing so much distress that they risk damaging delicate wings. At the other end of the spectrum, the accumulation of stuff by people who die alone in homes overwhelmed by stacks of ancient newspapers and tins of cat food, is a kind of sickness. It’s a condition that can overwhelm even the most celebrated of artists. In the last 17 years of his life, Andy Warhol filled a succession of cardboard boxes with a seemingly random accumulation of objects: taxi receipts, a vinyl Ramones single signed by Joey Ramone, a piece of an ancient, mummified foot, pastel-coloured corsets and a selection of metal dentures. Every time he had a full box, it was sealed and shipped off to storage in a warehouse in New Jersey. A typical box has 400 objects in it, some have as many as 1,200. Items in them include a piece of Caroline Kennedy’s wedding cake – Warhol seems to have been a regular guest at Kennedy weddings. He showed up 20 minutes after the wedding ceremony for Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger had started, in the company of Grace Jones. He was in black leather, and wearing two wigs; she had on a huge green fur hat.   Warhol’s boxes are a collection of the uncollectable and the uncontrollable, which, thanks to the resources of the Andy Warhol Foundation, has been tamed after six years of work by a dedicated group of archivists and cataloguers. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh has aestheticised the cardboard boxes. They sit on back-lit shelves in the museum to suggest that this is not a random collection of trash that Warhol never looked at, but, in the view of the museum, is in fact a time-based art piece, comprising at least 500,000 objects that took 30 years to complete. It presents a considerably less impressive sight than British Regency period architect Sir John Soane’s museum. The architect of the Bank of England put as much effort into adapting his Lincoln’s Inn Fields house (and subsequently the two adjoining houses) to display his Hogarth paintings, a sarcophagus and his architectural models, as he did to accumulating the collection itself. The Nobel prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s novel, The Museum of Innocence is an eloquent exploration of the hoarding end of the collecting spectrum. What initially appears to be an account of a doomed love affair, quickly reveals itself as an exploration of the meaning of collecting. The story’s main protagonist Kemal starts acquiring things when his relationship with his lover Füsun is going well. When she drops an earring, he finds it and puts it to one side. As Füsun falls out of love with him, Kemal begins an increasingly desperate accumulation of objects that record their relationship. He picks up each of the cigarettes that she smokes. When she has stopped seeing him altogether, Kemal starts hanging around at her parents’ house and stealing pieces of cutlery that she might have used.  What makes Pamuk’s book particularly remarkable is that he acquired a house in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district that had belonged to a Greek merchant in the Ottoman era, and transformed it into a physical Museum of Innocence. It is, of course, very far from innocent; everything inside it is a lovingly created fiction. The first thing that you see once you get inside, is a wall covered with 4,213 cigarette ends, each of them carefully annotated in Pamuk’s neat handwriting, with imaginary details of the time and place they were smoked. The rest of the house is full of equally carefully fabricated objects from cosmetics to movie posters that reflect Pamuk’s vision of the modernising Turkey of the 1970s. “I think getting attached to objects happens in traumatic times and love is a trauma,” Pamuk once said. “Perhaps when they are in trouble, people hoard things.”  When Pamuk gave me a tour of his museum, he told me about meeting Warhol’s archivist, and expressed his reservations about the significance of the boxes in Pittsburgh. “Hoarding objects reaches the level of collecting only when there is a story that unites them,” he said. But that is a novelist criticising another, less narrative art form. While Freud’s desk in Hampstead was always useable, if overcrowded, the desk in fashion designer Paul Smith’s office in Covent Garden is completely overwhelmed with a snowdrift of collected objects that sweeps over an office chair, down onto the floor, and back up to the shelves that line every wall. There are stacks of books and magazines, cameras and mountains of vintage cycling jerseys. There is an i-Mac computer, a gift from Jony Ive that Smith has never used. Computers aren’t Smith’s thing. In any case, it’s too late now, short of purging half the contents of the room: there is no way to get near it. There are toy tin cars, collections of bottles from Moroccan markets, a pink bicycle and a lot of rabbits. “I once said in an interview that seeing a rabbit brings me luck, and they haven’t stopped pouring in ever since,” explains Smith. Collecting began, as did so many things in Smith’s career, with his early enthusiasm for cycling. Growing up in Nottingham in the 1950s, there was a newsagent which occasionally had a copy of L’Equipe, which would portray the heroes of the Tour de France in their yellow jerseys in colour on the cover, but in sepia inside. He bought the magazine, fascinated by the images, even if he couldn’t read it. “I can remember once saying, ‘I really like Jacques Anquetil’ to my father, which baffled him, since none of our family had ever been abroad. I saved my pocket money so that I could upgrade the gears on my bike from Simplex to Campagnolo. The box it came in was as important to me as the gear itself.”  What attracted Smith to the Campagnolo box, along with stamps and matchboxes which he has in large numbers – not just in his office but at his Nottingham HQ where he has an archivist trying to make sense of it all – is the way that designers can say so much in such a tiny space. He showed me a Japanese book of matches produced for a Tokyo nightclub in the 1970s. “It so clearly says it’s ‘contemporary’. You can hear the jazz already.”  Despite the huge assortment of assembled objects, Smith is reluctant to describe himself as a collector. “I just have a large quantity of the same things,” he says, matter of factly. “In my head, a collector is someone who selects an item or a subject. They collect them because they know a lot about them. Maybe I have a little knowledge about cycling jerseys.  In the early 1980s, on my first trips to Japan and India, I just got a bit carried away. I bought lots of Japanese furniture. In India, for some reason, I bought 15 wardrobes, and a piece of furniture that doubled as a staircase with drawers.” Smith had them all sent home on the Trans-Siberian Express.  He suggests that his is a collection that has found him. “Things collect me,” he says. “For some reason I started to be sent things, and they still keep coming.” There is an individual who regularly sends Smith artefacts that come unwrapped but covered in postage stamps. Others send him letters, toys, books and even ancient packets of razor blades. One visitor took careful photographs of his office, and later sent him a precisely detailed model of his office, complete with its chaotic contents. Smith’s London home, where he lives with his wife Pauline, is much calmer. “The house is hers. I do have one room for my stuff, but it’s mostly at the office that I get to look at things.” In 1996, patron of the arts and barrister Jill Ritblat gave the V&A Museum the largest single donation of clothes in its history, more than 1,000 items. There are ski outfits in postmodern pastel shades from the 1980s, and challenging Japanese experiments from Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake, as well as couture from Dior and Saint Laurent. There is work by Alexander McQueen, Biba, Mary Quant, and Christian Lacroix, Emanuel Ungaro and Victor Edelstein, and an evening outfit produced by a dressmaker based on an idea of Ritblat’s own design.  The early days of British fashion from the 1960s are represented by Foale and Tuffin, and Zandra Rhodes, and from the 1980s by Margaret Howell and Katharine Hamnett. There is tailoring from Tommy Nutter and work by Giorgio Armani. It is by no means a complete account of contemporary fashion, but it is certainly extensive, and like the personal wardrobe that it is, combines some very special pieces made for family occasions, with more everyday wear. The connecting thread of Ritblat’s collection is Ritblat herself. These were all pieces that she had bought to wear. They were not chosen like stamps, or old masters, or celadon vases to make a self-conscious collection, but were the result of a continuing sequence of choices over time. Taken together they are a reflection of her life as an English woman of a certain background, at a particular time in the country’s history. “I never saw it as a collection, it was more like my diary, though I have never had time to write a diary. Each piece brings back memories of when I wore it,” says Ritblat. She made her first donation to the V&A at the end of 1996, but kept back the things that she wanted to be able to go on using, and they formed the core of a donation to the Design Museum of another 400 items in 2013. Ritblat is ambivalent about fashion. As a child she was somewhat self-conscious about being dressed by her mother, who had studied fashion herself. She was relieved to be able to assume the camouflage of the complex uniform rituals of an English public school for girls in the 1950s. “I loved my school uniform at Roedean; we were expected to change our clothes four times a day, as chic as anything. Scratchy afternoon dresses, regulation school loafers, very nice blazers and pleated skirts.” As a student barrister, she found herself adopting the formal uniform of the legal profession, but then as a married woman began to build a wardrobe that reflected the life that she was leading. Later, when she was making her own choices, she was early to discover Miuccia Prada. “What you pick out is based on whether it suits you and on the zeitgeist,” she explains. Smith, Heseltine and Ritblat represent three very different approaches to collecting. For Smith, the unruly mountain of things in his office, is, like the collection on Sigmund Freud’s desk, part of the tools of his imagination, a source of imagery and ideas for his work as a designer. It’s also a means of establishing his personality. Heseltine’s garden is an investment of time, resources and creativity in the remaking of a place that speaks to the future using living organisms that will outlive us all. Ritblat’s clothes are a record of the full life of an individual. All of these collections provide insights into unique people, their lives and times. In their different ways all three reflect on the nature of collecting, and its ability to be a creative activity in itself. In a world in which technology threatens to abolish the material world altogether, objects have not lost their allure. Their physical condition marks the passing of time in ways that pixels and code cannot do. Collecting is the means all of us have to create histories of our times, and even more, of ourselves. This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two. 

In order to explore the mindset of the collector, Deyan Sudjic shines a light on the collected objects of Sigmund Freud and Andy Warhol, and speaks to three British collectors to better understand what it is that makes collecting such a vital part of the human experience.

Exploring the mindset of the collector and why the act is a vital part of the human experience, with a focus on Sigmund Freud and Andy Warhol

FONDATA: Exploring the art of collecting 

 I Collect, Therefore I Am

For many, the past 12 months meant working in isolation and big plans were shelved. At Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite), it was an extremely proactive year of change. These changes have resulted in the strongest line up of wines from the Lafite stable we can remember. Ch. Duhart-Milon has seen a massive step up in quality with their 2020, and Lafite has reached new levels of ethereal finesse – while their Pomerol property, L’Evangile, has found fantastic freshness and clarity without losing any of its Pomerol opulence. They are a unique line-up of wines, each brimming with personality. As the demands for precision viticulture becomes more established in today’s top-flight Bordeaux, the leading First Growth estates know they must be at the forefront of these changes if they are to maintain their preeminent stature. Ch. Lafite Rothschild and its fellow Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite) estates of L’Evangile, Duhart-Milon and Rieussec are no different. In this dynamic period for Bordeaux such changes and improvements have taken many forms. Perhaps the most visibly apparent development at DBR Lafite is the new winemaking facility for Ch. Duhart-Milon right in the centre of Pauillac’s town centre. It fortunately came into operation just in time for the 2020 vintage.  DBR Lafite’s International Director Jean-Sébastien Philippe believes the exceptional state-of-the-art facility has brought “a new level of precision to the wine”. The introduction of temperature-controlled, smaller vats allows for plot-by-plot fermentation, picking the grapes only at optimum ripeness, rather than lumped all together in one vat. On tasting, it has clearly made a huge impact on the wine, with better ripeness to the tannins. It has really captured the finesse so typical of its bigger sibling Lafite. The clarity of fruit is fantastic and is a big step up for the estate. Perhaps less visible but no less significant is the new team dynamic now operating at the properties, where a heightened level of collaboration has been instilled to better circumnavigate decisions made in the vineyard. Philippe is quick to point out that 2020 was what the French call “un millésime de vignerons”, in that the success or failure of the 2020 vintage lay firmly at the feet of those working in the vineyard. It was a growing season where many difficult decisions had to be made.  The 2020 vintage is in fact Lafite’s first full vintage working organically (and L’Evangile’s third) – no mean feat considering the outburst of mildew that threatened the vineyards in the wet spring. Never has collaboration and specialist know-how been more essential.  “We needed to question ourselves a lot,” admits Philippe, “and no one is right alone... It was a vintage where the vigneron was forced to question themselves every day. It was a vintage of contrast and team spirit. We had to think collectively across the team,” he adds.  It is the first year that the two flagship properties of L’Evangile and Lafite have had two separate dedicated Technical Directors with Eric Kohler remaining in charge of Lafite and Duhart-Milon, while Olivier Trégoat was able to focus on L’Evangile and Rieussec. Beyond the permanent staff at each château, the team was able to make use of a shared research and development team headed up by Manuela Brando. It was Brando’s crucial role to co-ordinate data, empirical research, and lead improvements while working collaboratively with the different teams in the vineyard. Something she has been doing with the Lafite team since 2015. This additional level of research has enabled the teams to make some bold decisions, resulting in some truly impressive wines in 2020. Although Lafite is consistently lower in alcohol than most other Pauillac properties, for the wine to come in at just 12.8% alcohol in what was a dry, hot vintage is staggering. Beyond that, the wine is no less detailed or impactful for it, bringing a level of the ethereal into the Pauillac structure. It is an extraordinary wine – so light on its feet, yet deceptively structured with fantastic depth. There are few estates with the confidence to produce a Pauillac of such finesse, but it remains Lafite’s signature. At L’Evangile, their courage was displayed at harvest. Philippe is proud to admit they were the first property out picking in the vineyards of Pomerol – determined to capture the freshness of the vintage. They had picked 80% of the entire crop prior to the heatwave that hit the Right Bank between 12th and 14th September.  “With the natural richness and maturity of the grapes, we are always looking for freshness and balance,” says Philippe, “always trying to make wines that seem younger the older the wines get.” At L’Evangile, they took another brave step and reduced the cuvaison period from 28 days' maceration on skins down to 21-23 days. This was another way to increase freshness in the wine. They also reduced the new oak to 50% (previously it made up 80%). But the key for Philippe was “to be very precise at assemblage”. “It is important to have as many lots of wines as possible to taste when blending,” he says. “2020 is a vintage which required tough decisions – there was no room for compromise.”  L’Evangile is undoubtedly very special this year. Perhaps even better than 2019, which was already very good. The wine has great generosity, so typical of Pomerol, but is more elegant in 2020. What is so impressive about the wine is its sustain on the palate: it has incredible length, and the clarity of fruit just stays with you right to the finish. Changes are far from over at Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite), as plenty of further experimentation continues behind the scenes. But what is abundantly clear with the 2020 wines is their investment and commitment to collaborative viticulture is setting a precedent amongst the elite of Bordeaux – and the wines have never been more precise. Browse all Lafite listings or read more Editorial 

Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite)’s Jean-Sébastien Philippe speaks to Gavin Smith about the benefits of collaboration amongst its châteaux – Lafite, L’Evangile, Rieussec and Duhart-Milon

Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite)’s Jean-Sébastien Philippe on the benefits of collaboration amongst  Lafite, L’Evangile, Rieussec and Duhart-Milon

Domaines Barons de Rothschild year of innovation

Domaines Barons de Rothschild: a year of innovation

Winemaker Jessica Servet has certainly been busy since our last visit to Hegarty Chamans, an enchanting vineyard in the hills of the Minervois. The winery’s success over the last few years and conversion to biodynamics has earned them an enviable reputation – both abroad and locally. Servet has since been elected deputy mayor of the local village and asked to take the lead on environmental sustainability issues in the wider district. Once a team of outsiders – with the estate founded by Englishman Sir John Hegarty and his wife Philippa, they are now increasingly influential in the region. But this wasn’t always the case: Hegarty Chamans has always seen itself as the “black sheep” of the Minervois.  From the outset it had a very clear goal to promote organic principles, which back in 2002 was radical for the region. The estate was also keen to produce wines of a certain style, wines that were elegant and very pure, resisting what Servet describes as “the make-up” of products that can be (and are) widely used in the region to affect the style and flavour profile of the wines. “People want the wines very ripe but with acidity,” Servet explains, “so they simply pick late and add acidity in the winery. This is something we are strongly against. We want to produce a balance in the wine without manipulation.” In the southern French heat, it can be tricky to produce wines that are fully ripe, while also keeping the alcohol in check and retaining freshness. Servet explains the key to their success is not to push the vines too hard. “You look around and some vignerons are willing to push their vines to the extreme to maximise yield, 80 to 90 hl/ha is not unusual for the region. The vines are weak, susceptible to uneven ripening and disease and finding balance in the wine is not easy. We realised we had to drop right down to 25 to 30 hl/ha to find that natural balance.”  She goes on to explain this approach produced a wine style that initially was deemed “not Minervois enough”. Their wines had even been rejected by the appellation at tasting (to carry the appellation’s name, wines have to be presented to a tasting panel).  The irony is that their purist attempts to reflect the vineyard were seen as atypical of the region. This rejection, while unhelpful, did not steer them off course. Thankfully in more recent years their philosophy and the success of the wines both locally and further afield has seen their approach become influential in what is a true representation of Minervois, or
perhaps what is more important for Servet, a true representation of the Hegarty Chamans vineyards. It is a very particular site and not dissimilar to the likes of the secluded wineries of Ch. Rayas, further north in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, or even the secluded vineyard of Soldera in Tuscany. What they all have in common, alongside low yields, is a belief that great vineyard sites need biodiversity to produce great wine.  All these vineyards are surrounded by forests that not only protect the vineyard from chemical infiltration from neighbouring sites, but benefit from a rich ecosystem that protects soil health and the vine’s natural resistance to disease, extending its natural life. The ultimate goal is to have a vineyard in perfect self-sustaining health. Servet believes this rich biodiversity is key to the vineyard working with its surrounding environment. Animals are a fundamental part of this: the estate raises a small flock of sheep which eliminates the weeds which grow between the vines and provides natural fertiliser, supplemented by other organic manures.  They also keep bees and prepare their own composts which are energised using specific biodynamic preparations. After spreading on agricultural soils, they encourage microbiological life and the mineral and organic richness which Servet believes is at the source of the strong terroir expression found in the wines. Beyond Hegarty Chamans, Servet is also encouraging others to employ a sustainable approach. In the region, all three of the main wineries are now organic and her latest domestic project is to organise a communal composting system for all residents living in the region.  Hegarty Chamans’ top cuvée, Black Knight, comes from the estate’s finest vineyards and is made only in the best vintages. We were fortunate to taste the 2016 on a number of occasions earlier this year, from barrel and following bottling (which is exclusively in magnum). We were blown away by the quality, the textural richness of the wine, the layering of the tannins and the purity of fruit – which is really special. It certainly has the signature elegance the winery has always promoted above anything else, but there is Minervois power too. Servet knows in the run up to harvest whether there will be a Black Knight cuvée – and in 2016, it proved to be a very easy decision. “We had enough rain in the spring to see us through the summer with very steady weather, no heat spikes and very even ripening, it was the most relaxed season I can remember,” she explains. The cuvée is made typically from the same favoured plots. Syrah, which makes up 80% of the blend, always comes from the Rabbit vineyard. “It's special due to the particular exposition of the vineyard and the effects of a distinct red and white clay in the soil. It produces an unbelievable freshness to the Syrah from this site,” says Servet.  The Carignan (typically around 10% of the blend) always comes from the oldest vines on the entire property, high up on the hill above the winery, 60 to 70 years in age and offering consistency every year. The Grenache, however, is not always from the same site, and is often chosen after vinification.  “I know the flavour profile I am looking for and when I find it, it goes in. The best expression of Grenache is based on picking it at exactly the right time. It gives you incredibly pure strawberry jam flavour with white pepper. When you capture both that sweet and spicy flavour in the wine you know you have got it right,” explains Servet. Using only natural yeast, the grapes go through fermentation and undergo a four-week maceration with gentle extraction, with the wine kept at a low temperature to retain aromatics. Only the free-run juice used for Black Knight – again retaining the elegance in the wine. The wine is then aged in a mix of one, two and three-year-old 300-litre barriques, Stockinger and Séguin Moreau barrels for 22-24 months. It is this long élevage that creates the wonderful layered texture in the wine. “There are lots of tannins in the wine and it needs this time to fully integrate in barrel,” Servet says. As I push further to understand the secret behind this cuvée, Servet admits there is always a sense of mystery in winemaking. A lot of the time her work is done on instinct and how she feels. Servet explains that if she is in a bad mood, she doesn't go near the wines. "There is energy here and I trust in that. I feel it in the vineyards and I feel it in the winery.” There is certainly a bit of magic that goes on in winemaking and the vineyards of Hegarty Chamans are certainly special – as you can feel in the wine. The 2016 Black Knight is the finest cuvée we have tasted from the property, and it is fast becoming one of the most exciting wines from the south of France.  Find out more about Hegarty Chamans and browse all listings

Ahead of the latest release of Hegarty Chamans’ top cuvée, Black Knight, we caught up with Winemaker Jessica Servet to find out more about what makes this secluded vineyard in the hills of the Minervois so special

Winemaker Jessica Servet talks about what makes the secluded vineyard of Hegarty Chamans’ top wine cuvée Black Knight in the hills of Minervois so special. 

Making a mark in the Minervois

After a stint in the cellars of the Côte d’Or, talking and tasting about the 2022 vintage, Sophie Thorpe reports on the year – one that seems to be a blessing, both for producers and wine drinkers

After a stint in the cellars of the Côte d’Or, talking and tasting about Burgundy’s 2022 vintage, we report on the year and its wines

Burgundy 2022 vintage overview

Burgundy 2022: vintage overview

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