Hospices de Beaune Auction Tasting - Day 4 of Visit to Burgundy 2010



Hospices de Beaune

20 November 2010: A drizzly day. We started the morning with tasting of the wines for auction at the Hospices de Beaune. With a pen and the scoring sheet in hand, Richard and I went round the room, tasting the wines, organized into flights of 5. This is the 150th year of the Hospices de Beaune auctions and the organizers even flew to China to introduce to Chinese wine enthusiasts the diversity of the Hospices de Beaune wines. With the publicity it has already attracted, not least attendance by Chinese and French celebrities, one could only predict that the prices would go through the roof! So the tasting might just be as close as we could get to the actual barrels!



The tasting room

 A bit of background on the Hospices de Beaune auctions. In 1443, Nicolas Rolin, then chancellor to Philippe Le Bon, the Duke of Burgundy, and his wife Guigone de Salins, set up the Hôtel-Dieu to look after the sick and the poor at a time of great famine and misery. The Hospital was fortunate to receive donations in the form of money, land, buildings and not least of all, vineyards. The first gift in the form of vineyard was donated to the Hospital in 1457 and this was followed by many over the centuries. The wine produced from the vineyards would be sold each year and the proceeds to fund the charitable activities of the Hospices. The sale by auction officially started in 1859. Traditionally, each lot was sold only after two flames (candles) had been extinguished. This tradition is now only applied to limited number of bids in the sale. Firmly established as the most famous charity wine auction in the world, the Hospices de Beaune engaged Christie’s to host the auction from 2005. 2010 marked the 150th auction with a couple of additions: a new cuvée Santenay Cuvée Christine Friedberg and the Corton Charlemagne Cuvée Charlotte Dumay renamed as Cuvée du Roi du Soleil, as a tribute to King Louis XIV.