The blooming of red Burgundy wines

POMMARD, France: The black clouds gathered last week over the Côte d'Or, the slender 50-kilometer-long swath that comprises the great vineyards of Burgundy. And for at least the fifth day in a row they burst forth, drenching the vineyards shortly before the critical period of flowering, when the grape bunches begin to form on the spindly vines.

Rain is the farmer's blessing, when it comes at the right time and in the right amount. But when the ground is saturated and the air is warm, the resulting moisture and humidity is a curse that can threaten the grapes with mildew and rot.

In past decades such weather might have spelled doom for the year's vintage. But nowadays it means something else entirely. "It means more work for us," said Benjamin Leroux, 33, the manager of Comte Armand, one of the best producers in Pommard in the Côte de Beaune, the southern half of the Côte d'Or. "All the things we're doing in the vineyard right now, we're insuring the vintage."

Twenty years ago nobody could have predicted that Burgundy could be trusted to produce reliably good wines in tricky vintages. As captivating as the great wines of Burgundy could be at their heights, too often they revealed their depths - diluted, overly acidic wines that seemed to vary not just vintage to vintage but almost bottle to bottle. The only thing consistent about the region was its inconsistency.

In fact, the quality of Burgundy - red Burgundy in particular - has risen strikingly over the last two decades. From the smallest growers to the biggest houses, the standards of grape-growing and winemaking have surpassed anybody's expectations. These days, Burgundy has very few bad vintages, and among good producers, surprisingly few bad wines.

The best producers, like Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Armand Rousseau, always managed to achieve a high standard, but nowadays the bar has risen for everybody. And it's not just the Côte d'Or, the heart of Burgundy, that has shown such improvement. Surrounding areas like the Côte Chalonnaise and the Mâconnais, still part of Burgundy, are producing better wine than ever, at not unreasonable prices. Sure, you can still find bad Burgundy. But really, it's not hard to find bad wines from any fine wine region.

"It's not so much an improvement as a blooming," said Becky Wasserman, an American wine broker who has lived in Burgundy since 1968. "It's a realization of potential."

I spent five days in Burgundy last week to get a first-hand look at the reasons for the surge in quality. In traveling the Côte d'Or from Marsannay in the north to Santenay in the south, visiting two dozen producers, tasting hundreds of wines and drinking not quite that many, it was easy to see that this leap upward has been 25 years in the making, an eternity in the Internet world but a split second at the rhythmic agricultural pace of viticulture.

Most striking of all was the number of young producers making superb wines, whether they have taken charge of their family domains or started out new. In Marsannay, perhaps the least-esteemed commune in the Côtes de Nuits, the northern half of the Côte d'Or, Sylvain Pataille, 33, is turning out excellent reds, whites and rosés. In the Hautes-Côtes de Nuits, once a backwater in the hills, David Duband, 37, is producing light, fresh regional wines from his ancestral vineyards, along with a series of more ambitious, elegant reds from grand cru vineyards like Echézeaux and Charmes-Chambertin.

Louis-Michel Liger-Belair, 35, in Vosnes-Romanée has reclaimed some of the greatest vineyard property in the north, which his family had leased out for years, and is making wines of purity and depth.

In Meursault in the south, Arnaud Ente, who took over his father-in-law's vineyards in the 1990s, is turning out small amounts of whites of focus and clarity that show tremendous minerality. Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey, 36, left his father's domain, Marc Colin et Fils, and set up shop in Chassagne-Montrachet, where he is making light yet intense, mouthwatering whites.

"Half the superstar domains today didn't exist 20 years ago," Clive Coates, author of "The Wines of Burgundy" (University of California Press, 2008), told me in a recent interview. Few could have envisioned such a level of quality back in the early 1980s, a time when Claude Bourguignon, a French soil scientist for numerous wine estates, famously said that the soil of the Sahara had more life in it than the soil of Burgundy.

Their first order of business was to wean the soil off two decades worth of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. The postwar dependency on science and industry had dealt a severe blow to Burgundy, which more than most wine regions prided itself on its soil. The nuances of terroir, the semi-mystical French term that encompasses earth, atmosphere, climate and humanity, were said to be transmitted to the wines by the qualities of the differing soils throughout the Côte d'Or.

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