World News Gathered & Syndicated

By WILLIAM BOSTWICK

The great thing about beer is its versatility. Beer can go high or low; we can gather ’round a six-pack, or something special brought up from the cellar; we can knock it back in a tallboy, or savor it in a snifter. But often, beer drinking falls back on plebian vulgarities, on pints pounded, on bongs and shotguns. Its tradition is grander: Think of the Egyptians who offered saffron-and-date beer to their pharaohs and gods, or the 18th-century English lords who brewed barleywine to mark a first son’s birth, and opened it when he turned 18.

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

This season is the best time to try these celebratory beers.

Beer, in other words, was once a drink of celebration. More recently, however, those laurels have fallen on wine alone, as a dinner party offering or holiday toast. But that’s finally changing. Brewers have lately been courting the class (and cash) of the wine world with bigger bottles, heftier price tags, claims of terroir, even—or, at least—profound, boastful flavors. This new generation of beer demands a different kind of drinking: Raise a glass, and drain it slowly.

This season is the best time to try these celebratory beers. There’s their fizz, of course, to punctuate your holiday with exclamation marks of popping corks (or hissing caps). There’s their size—big bottles with more joy to spread, 750 milliliters and up (and up)—and their strength as well. These single-bottle beers are often more potent than their by-the-case brethren, meant to be savored, not slugged—warming and spirited, drinkable hearths.

There are explicitly holiday-themed beers, of course: festively labeled and flavored with an often secret blend of seasonal spices like nutmeg and clove. Think beer, mulled. These are always popular. Anchor started bottling its Christmas Ale in magnums in 1991 when it released 101 1,500-mililiter bottles; the following year it made almost 2,000.

A few beers are brewed, like Champagne, with the méthode champenoise, a convoluted process in which beer is fermented a second time, in the bottle, then carefully strained of its yeasty sediment, topped off with fresh beer and corked tight, producing an extra fizzy (and often extra-strong) tipple. (Once a rare, Belgian variety, these so-called bières de Champagne are catching on stateside, made even by big-name brewers like Sam Adams’s Boston Beer Company.)

If all of this is a turnoff, if you prefer your celebratory toasts unpretentious and filled right to the brim, don’t worry. The beers gathered here are festive in their own right—sized for sharing, spiced and strong, corked and foil-wrapped—but they are still beer. Their brewing methods may be complicated and their spice mixtures elusive and beguiling, but one needn’t dwell on that. Enjoyable is the word. Champagne is a place; celebration is a state of mind.

By KATY MCLAUGHLIN

After years of convincing the nation’s coffee drinkers that dark-roasted brews are the classiest thing to fill a mug or takeout cup, Starbucks, Peet’s, and a new wave of high-end chains are rolling out the exact opposite: light-roasted coffee.

Dark-roasted coffee is getting competition from a new rival, the lighter roast. Katy McLaughlin reports on Lunch Break. Photo: AP.

The target customers for the new style of coffee are people like Jackie Russell, a retired school administrator in Los Angeles. Ms. Russell’s son Ted Russell is something of a coffee connoisseur, who has shared his passion for Peet’s dark-roasted coffee with his mother. Only problem: She hates it.

“It’s really just a terrible taste to me. It almost tastes like something that has burned,” says Ms. Russell.

To capture customers like Ms. Russell, Starbucks Corp. in January introduced Blonde Roast, a light-roasted blend now sold in the chain’s 10,787 U.S. stores and which will be stocked in grocery stores this week. Peet’s Coffee & Tea will roll out two “medium roast” blends in its 197 stores late next month. It introduced the lighter-roasted beans in 6,400 grocery stores in July.

A raft of new high-end cafes and coffee roasters, including Intelligentsia Coffee in Chicago and Los Angeles, Blue Bottle Coffee Co. in New York and San Francisco, Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco, and Handsome Coffee Roasters in Los Angeles, take the embrace of light roast even further: They only sell light-roasted coffee and say that dark roasting is tantamount to ruining good coffee.

Coffee companies are doing well as demand grows world-wide, though the economic downturn slowed expansion in the U.S., analysts say.This drove firms to conjure up additional products—including light roasts—to draw in new customers and sell more to their regulars.

It’s a dramatic turn for the specialty coffee industry, which began expanding rapidly 20 years ago. This new coffee differed from what Americans were used to with its strong, bold, deep taste—partly the result of dark-roasted beans. Many coffee snobs say they can only drink the dark brews at Starbucks or Peet’s, and that anything else tastes like dishwater.

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Coffee companies are looking to sell lighter roasts to home grinders and brewers, as well as to sit-down patrons at their cafés.

U.S. coffee drinkers may tend to think of dark roast as European and sophisticated. However, light-roasted coffee, brewed strong, is the norm in Northern Europe, including Germany and Scandinavia. Many high-end roasters today are working to convince customers that light roasting is the best way to coax the delicate, nuanced flavors out of high quality beans.

“When it is dark, you taste charcoal, the same charcoal that’s on a piece of toast,” says Jeremy Tooker, owner of Four Barrel. “We’re trying to show you the reasons why you bought the coffee,” by light roasting and letting subtle flavors emerge.

Those are fighting words for die-hard dark-roasted coffee fans and companies that popularized these bold brews.

“While it is true you can roast a coffee to the point that you annihilate the flavor if you don’t do it correctly, our approach is to balance the origin with the flavor of the roast,” says Andrew Linnemann, director of coffee quality at Starbucks. The company rolled out Blonde Roast after a growing number of customers asked the stores’ baristas and commented on the company website that they wanted lighter-roasted beans.

Starbucks also conducted a study last year using an online questionnaire as well as taste tests in which people sampled coffee roasted to different degrees of darkness. The company says 42% prefer a lighter roast. Starbucks chose the term “blonde” because “light” can “infer that something has been removed” or might confuse consumers who think of light coffee as having milk added, a spokeswoman says. Plenty of customers still prefer darker roasted beans, but now they have a choice, the company says.

Tully’s Coffee, a unit of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc., asks consumers on its website to first identify their preferred roasting style, and then suggests suitable coffees.

One company that is strongly associated with dark roasting is Peet’s, a specialty coffee pioneer based in Emeryville, Calif. Its “medium roast” offers customers a choice, but Peet’s isn’t saying lighter roasting is better.

“It is quality that matters,” not roasting style, says Doug Welsh, Peet’s vice president of coffee.

Coffee roasting is a complex craft, and the industry has no consumer-friendly metric to identify how light or dark beans have been roasted.

Depending on the bean varietal, origin, density and the desired result, beans can spend as little as nine minutes at 400 degrees or as much as 16 minutes at 440 degrees, says George Howell, founder of Acton, Mass.-based George Howell Coffee Co., which sells light-roasted beans wholesale and over the Internet. Very dark roasted beans emerge from the process a dark-brown color and release some of their oils to the surface. Light roasted beans can be a light wood color and aren’t oily.

A shift in the coffee market has made it easier for roasters to buy directly from Latin American and African growers that produce the most desirable beans. Until a decade or so ago, anything besides beans from various producers blended together on the commodity market was tough to get. Specialty coffee sellers relied on dark roasting to coax maximum flavor out of beans that could be of middling quality.

Roasters disagree on which style is harder to do well. When poorly done, light roasting can leave beans tasting grassy and raw, while subpar dark-roasting can leave them tasting ashy and burned. Roasting style doesn’t affect caffeine content appreciably and dark-roasted coffee doesn’t provide more “buzz” than light. But because the flavor lingers in the mouth longer, some drinkers mistakenly believe that darker brews have more caffeine, said Mr. Linnemann of Starbucks.

Intelligentsia sells $19, 12-ounce bags of Anjilanaka organic beans from Bolivia, which boast hints of “white grape, honey and apple skin,” the website says, while Blue Bottle’s $18 Sidamo Taramessa comes from a cooperative farm in Ethiopia and tastes “punchy,” “winy” and “leathery,” the company says. These subtleties—along with the point of paying top dollar for the beans—would be obliterated by heavy roasting, the companies say.

“If we lined up five coffees from different regions and roasted them dark, then none of us could pick them out of a lineup,” says Tyler Wells, chief executive of Handsome, which sells coffee wholesale. Because quality beans, properly roasted retain more natural sweetness, Mr. Wells says that he won’t offer sugar when he opens his first café in February. He adds he has served thousands of coffees at events and has never offered sugar, to the consternation of some consumers.

Many consumers erroneously associate dark-roasted coffee with “strong” coffee, Mr. Howell says.

“Strength is a matter of how much coffee to water,” he says. While some drinkers enjoy the flavorful jolt of a dark coffee, “light roast rewards waiting a little bit, like letting a wine open after it has been poured,” and can taste even better as it cools, Mr. Howell says. Light roasts are best enjoyed without cream or sugar because they can be naturally sweet and not bitter, he adds.

Both Peet’s and Starbucks say their new roasts are bringing in new customers and getting more espresso-drink buyers to purchase beans for brewing at home. Mr. Russell reckons his mother is Starbucks’s target customer for Blonde Roast.

“I’m planning to give her a bag soon,” Mr. Russell says.

Write to Katy McLaughlin at katy.mclaughlin@wsj.com

By JURO OSAWA

Australian Rod Vawdrey might have the most important job at Japanese technology company Fujitsu Ltd.

The 54-year-old IT industry veteran joined Fujitsu in Sydney in 2003 and turned around the company’s struggling Australian operations. But earlier this year, he was given a new role as president of Fujitsu’s global business group. As the firm’s only non-Japanese senior executive, he is charged with streamlining Fujitsu’s fragmented overseas businesses and expanding its presence abroad.

Given global economic uncertainty and the impact of the strong yen, Mr. Vawdrey has his work cut out for him.

Japan’s largest information-technology-services provider by revenue recorded a net profit of ¥55.09 billion ($719 million) and revenue of ¥4.528 trillion in the year ended March 2011. Its overseas business accounts for about a third of revenue.

NEC Corp., another major Japanese IT vendor, generated only 15% of its revenue outside Japan in the fiscal year ended March 31. As Japan’s economic outlook remains uncertain, increasing overseas sales is a challenging yet necessary task for many Japanese companies.

Mr. Vawdrey, who is based in Australia, talked to The Wall Street Journal’s Juro Osawa in Tokyo. The following interview has been edited.

WSJ: What were your main achievements as the CEO of Fujitsu’s Australian unit?

Mr. Vawdrey: The Australian unit was just breaking even when I took over as its CEO in 2003, and it now has a profit margin of more than 5%. Its revenue has tripled to about $1.2 billion.

We had to buy several companies to rapidly increase the unit’s business portfolio. My strong philosophy in acquisitions is you should buy good companies, not distressed companies, even if they are cheap. Another thing is you should have your own business in good shape before seeking acquisitions. Bad companies can’t fix themselves by buying good companies.

WSJ: How can Fujitsu become a stronger global player?

Mr. Vawdrey: I always tell executives in Japan that our strength lies in having one Fujitsu around the world, instead of keeping overseas and domestic operations separate. More integration is necessary not just for cost efficiency, but also because our major customers are global companies that want more standardized technology services wherever they operate.

If you are working at IBM, its CEO won’t talk about the company’s global business excluding the U.S. At Fujitsu, we also shouldn’t say “our global business except Japan.”

WSJ: How can you improve Fujitsu’s overseas business?

Mr. Vawdrey: I think there has been some conservatism in the speed at which we are globalizing. We need to speed up our integration. You will see me and our top management team in Japan move faster in terms of globalization and standardization, though we can’t lose each region’s ability to respond to local needs.

In Europe, we’ve been very confident with our business in the U.K. and Ireland, but the governments are now going through a major austerity program and IT spending is declining. We have to re-engineer our work force to changing market dynamics, but spending patterns changed faster than our ability to respond.

It would be great to have more non-Japanese people in Japan and more Japanese executives internationally. We need more cross-border management. I will be encouraging the company to move more talents around the world from region to region.

WSJ: What is it like being the only non-Japanese executive at Fujitsu?

Mr. Vawdrey: It’s great fun. I love it. Sometimes things don’t necessarily move as fast as they might do between non-Japanese executives. But I have tremendous support from Tokyo. I make everything open and transparent, and share a lot with Tokyo. I’m sure that there are some people who challenge or question and that’s good.

WSJ: Where do you see the best opportunities?

Mr. Vawdrey: My main focus for the next two quarters will be getting our strategy right for the U.S. Fujitsu has had a number of subsidiaries there for a long time and we are now sort of bringing them together. I’m working with our U.S. team to help them collaborate with our products operations in Germany and also with Japan for services.

The market’s tough in the U.S., but we have such a small market share, and that means we have so much room to grow. I think our servers and storages will grow in the U.S. this year. We may double the units we had sold there last year.

In Europe, Germany is particularly strong as it continues to be a very strong economy.

WSJ: What are your thoughts on cloud computing?

Mr. Vawdrey: There will be lots of players in cloud computing, because the technology doesn’t have huge barriers to entry. But it’s a much more complex thing to actually take customers from where they are today to a new model with lower cost, more efficient self-service and all the things that come with the cloud. There won’t be many players that can do that.

We are, for example, working with airline industries on building new aircraft maintenance and parts-management systems. Airlines have to inspect every part and equipment every day on thousands of planes. If all parts and equipment carried smart tags, they could feed data into a cloud-based system and airlines can share that information instantaneously.

WSJ: How are you coping with the global economic uncertainty and the strength of the yen?

Mr. Vawdrey: We believe our global business is in a robust condition and capable of meeting these challenges. A significant proportion of our business is in long-term services-based contracts. In many cases, this is a counterbalance to the short-term volatility. Our product businesses depend on raw materials that are bought and sold in a variety of currencies, and we have solid policies and controls in place to manage these risks across our business and in each country.

Write to Juro Osawa at juro.osawa@dowjones.com

New York’s Tuthilltown Gristmill is a long way from Nasmyth Road, a quiet, nondescript Victorian terrace in the suburbs of West London. Around 3,500 miles, if you had to put a figure on it. But the spirit of the Hudson Valley farm distillery isn’t far from a small, disused garage near the River Thames where a 2½-year-old copper still lies gently hissing away, distilling one of London’s newest gins.

Drinking Now

From everyday drinking to a treat from the cellar, three gins perfect for tasting today.

That gin is Sipsmith, praised for its zesty aromatics and dry “London style.” Such is its success—it is now stocked in a swathe of upscale bars, including London’s Savoy Hotel, Boca Grande restaurant in Barcelona and Soho House in Berlin—that Sipsmith has added sloe gin, vodka, damson vodka and a summer cup to its portfolio. There are also plans for a second still and a U.S. export deal. For a brand that began life barely three years ago, it’s been quite a ride.

The story goes back to 2002, when, in a Lower Manhattan coffee bar, childhood friends Stamford Galsworthy and Fairfax Hall found themselves thinking of home. The drinks business had led them from England to the East Coast of America, where Mr. Galsworthy was working in the export department of U.K. brewer Fuller Smith & Turner PLC in New York and Mr. Hall held a job with Diageo PLC’s strategy department in Philadelphia. Inspired by the small distilleries they encountered on their travels around America, such as Tuthilltown, Hangar One Vodka near San Francisco and Bluecoat Gin in Philadelphia, they had the genesis of an idea: to create their own microdistillery in London.

 

Wine Accessories to Make Wine Even More Fun

2:39

WSJ Wine Columnist Lettie Teague scans the wine accessories market and finds a few good tools and many destined-for-the-drawer toys on Lunch Break.

“There were so many things about the microdistilling culture in America that were great,” says the 35-year-old Mr. Galsworthy. “The quality of production was so much better. There was a real energy around all these little microdistilleries popping up everywhere, and we saw how consumers loved the buzz of an artisanal product.” But it took them five years, says Mr. Hall, 36, to “talk themselves into it.” After quitting their jobs, they moved back to England and set up shop in a West London premises that once belonged to the late whisky writer Michael Jackson. Employing the services of master distiller Jared Brown and commissioning a copper still from Germany’s oldest producers, Christian Carl, they set about creating a classic London-style gin, with unique botanical flavorings—a nod to the long-lost recipes of England’s West Country gins.

“It was a dream project,” admits Mr. Brown. “The evening I met Sam and Fairfax, we got talking about our general philosophy and what made a good gin, and we all agreed that the best that could possibly be done in the modern age is to take today’s better equipment, better-controlled ingredients and apply those to the formulas and understandings that came up over the centuries of making gin.”

Gin’s origins stretch back to the Middle Ages, when it was served as a remedy for various ailments. The modern form is said to have been introduced to Britain by soldiers who had drunk it in Holland during the Eighty Years’ War (hence the expression “Dutch Courage”). It grew in popularity, reaching its height in the mid-18th century, when its distillation was so widespread the era became known as the Gin Craze. An increase in taxes, licensing requirements and a change in taste eventually led to the closure of many distilleries, leaving Beefeater as London’s major premium producer.

The process used to create gin—distilling spirit, water and juniper berries and various citrus botanicals such as coriander and cinnamon—hasn’t really changed since 18th century. But despite the one-time proliferation of stills in England, “Prudence” (the name Messrs. Hall and Galsworthy, inspired by a favored phrase of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave their still) was the first to be launched in London in nearly 200 years.

In order to create a unique taste, Jared Brown went through a raft of historical recipes from the 1,000-drinks-book library at his home in Gloucestershire, and started experimenting with ingredients such as Italian orris root and Chinese cassia bark. “The whole process took around six months,” he says. “The challenge was not the recipe, but tailoring it to the still.” And a desire to create a bit of gin-making history as well.

Corrections & Amplifications

The modern form of gin is said to have been introduced to Britain by soldiers who had drunk it in Holland during the Eighty Years’ War. An earlier version of this article said it was introduced during the Thirty Years’ War.

Write to Will Lyons at wsje.weekend@wsj.com

Por ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES de Miami

Durante décadas, o BalHarbour Shops reinou absoluto no varejo de luxo desta região da Flórida. Com faturamento de US$ 2.327 por pé quadrado (0,09 metro quadrado) no ano passado — mais de cinco vezes a média nacional dos Estados Unidos — o shopping center é o mais lucrativo do país e destino favorito do crescente número de brasileiros que têm vindo à Flórida.

Mas entrou em cena um desafiante. O incorporador Craig Robins está criando um novo destino para o varejo de luxo no elegante e artístico bairro Design District aqui em Miami, 15 quilômetros ao sul do BalHarbour.

As vendas de luxo nos EUA têm se mantido melhores do que o resto do setor varejista durante a má fase da economia, alimentadas em parte pela demanda de mercados emergentes. Em poucos lugares isso é mais evidente do que aqui, onde a economia foi energizada por consumidores em busca de apartamentos luxuosos na cidade — a poucos minutos do Design District — e o número cada vez maior de turistas endinheirados vindos do Brasil e outros países.

Na briga com o BalHarbour, Robins já gastou US$ 90 milhões nos últimos 12 meses para obter controle de cerca de 70% do Design District. Enquanto isso, o BalHarbour, que pertence à proeminente família local Whitman, afirma ter tido fortes altas no faturamento no último ano e que está planejando se expandir.

Um dos pioneiros no desenvolvimento da área praiana South Beach, Robins diz que cerca de 30 marcas de luxo já assinaram, ou estão perto de assinar, contratos de aluguel com ele, inclusive várias grifes que estão saindo do BalHarbour. A LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA afirma que vai levar 12 marcas, inclusive Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior e Bulgari, ao novo shopping. A Compagnie Financière Richemont SA informa que planeja levar dez marcas, inclusive a Cartier. Outras grifes também afirmam estar indo para o empreendimento, entre elas a Hermès, a Tom Ford e a Ermenegildo Zegna.

O Design District é “o antishopping center”, diz Robins. “Ele traz de volta a rua e o bairro como um grande destino de varejo.” Ele já fez do bairro um “point” cultural que abriga galerias, lojas de móveis e feiras de arte.

O plano de Robins, com um orçamento de US$ 200 milhões, é fazer uma faixa de três quarteirões só para pedestres ancorada em cada extremo por uma praça, além de um hotel butique e alguns prédios de apartamentos.

Getty Images

Uma vitrine no Design District, área que está atraindo varejo de luxo à medida que um aumento da demanda por parte de turistas endinheirados aumenta a concorrência para o tradicional shopping BalHarbour

O BalHarbour — um shopping a céu aberto com lagoas de carpas chinesas e plantas tropicais — há muito tem o domínio do mercado. Ele chegou a isso em parte ao forçar seus locadores a assinar contratos que os proíbem de abrir outras lojas num raio de 30 quilômetros, a menos que paguem uma porcentagem das vendas de tal loja. Embora essa prática seja comum em shoppings de luxo, as grifes estão se rebelando, diz Faith Hope Consolo, presidente da divisão de varejo do grupo imobiliário Douglas Elliman.

Por ser relativamente pequeno, o BalHarbour não tem acompanhado a alta da demanda por bens de luxo em Miami. “Miami tem oferecido pouco em termos de varejo comparado com o potencial da cidade”, diz Emmanuel Perrin, diretor-presidente da Cartier North America Inc.

Apesar das defecções, o BalHarbour continua sendo atraente para varejistas. À medida que novos espaços se tornaram disponíveis no último ano, várias marcas trataram de ocupá-los, entre elas a Balenciaga, a Afficine Panerai e a Stella McCartney, disse Matthew Whitman Lazenby, um membro da terceira geração da família Whitman, num email em resposta a perguntas.

As vendas subiram 23% no ano passado, apesar da saída da Louis Vuitton e da Cartier, diz ele. E ele diz que o shopping está tentando estender sua marca comprando terrenos vizinhos.

“Eles sempre serão especiais”, diz Consolo. “Mas simplesmente há outras oportunidades agora em Miami.”

Robins começou a comprar propriedades no Design District nos anos 90.

Quando a notícia de seus planos para um shopping de luxo começou a se alastrar, o preço de propriedades no bairro quintuplicou, para cerca de US$ 1.000 o pé quadrado, diz ele. Robins financiou a compra com caixa próprio — inclusive o gerado pela venda de participações em South Beach —, empréstimos bancários e investimentos de sócios como o L Real Estate, um fundo no qual a LVMH é um investidor minoritário.

Livre das amarras com o aluguel do BalHarbour, a Louis Vuitton planeja ter duas lojas em Miami — uma no Design District e outra na área de luxo do shopping Aventura, dez quilômetros ao norte do BalHarbour.

A few kilometers outside the ancient ramparts of Beaune, France, the road climbs behind the Corton hill to reveal the narrow streets of the splendid medieval village of Pernand-Vergelesses. Anyone who has walked these scree, limestone-covered slopes will tell you of its beauty; a stunning vista overlooking a wave of vines that threads into the vast plain of the Côte d’Or. Jumping out of the car, in the depths of a bitterly cold, damp November, when I visited, amid one of the region’s famous downpours, I wondered how on earth any vigneron can grow grapes in such an inhospitable, northern climate. But grow grapes they do, on a patchwork of vines planted in soil tended since the orders of the Benedictine monks farmed the land in the 10th and 11th centuries.

Getty Images

The medieval village of Pernand-Vergelesses and vineyards in Burgundy, France.

Appreciating the nuances of Burgundy’s complex weather patterns, with its multitude of wind, rain, sometimes hail, other times frost and, of course, its celebrated sun, is just one move in the vast game of chess one plays in evaluating a Burgundian vintage. No other region I can think of is so fascinating, attracts such devoted followers and manages to inspire both the intellect and the palate.

Perhaps one of its fascinations is that, from a wine point of view, it is fiendishly complicated to understand. At its simplest, the main two grape varieties are Pinot Noir for red and Chardonnay for white, with a little Gamay and Aligote grown there as well. The labels won’t tell you this, for while others have chosen to market their wines on the name of the grape variety, the wine estates or châteaux—or in some cases an invented name or that of a previous owner—in Burgundy, they have stuck with the tried and tested method of listing the vineyard, village and producer.

For example, Aux Reignots 1er Cru, Vosne-Romanée, from Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair is the name of the vineyard, Aux Reignots; the village, Vosne-Romanée; and the producer, Comte Liger-Belair. The 1er Cru refers to the quality classification of the vineyard. This is best understood as a four-tier cake. At the bottom are the large regional appellations, such as Bourgogne or Mâcon-Villages, followed by village wines, which take the name of a village whose terroir imparts a character on the wine. The last two classifications are perhaps the most important for the collector to understand. Premier Cru highlights vineyards of superior quality within or outside of a village. Grand Cru is the very top classification, indicating wines that come from the best vineyards on the most superior slopes. In “Inside Burgundy” (2010), author Jasper Morris says there are 33 Grand Crus.

Inevitably, this means that as demand increases and the Grand Cru wines become more well-known, there is going to be a continued upward pressure on prices. Interesting news for the investor, bad news for the legions of Burgundy lovers who have been buying these wines for many years.

Which brings us to the 2010 vintage, whose wines have just been previewed in a swathe of London tastings and are now on sale. The 2010 is shaping up to be one of those rare, remarkable vintages in which weather patterns conspire to produce wines of outstanding quality in some of Europe’s most famous wine regions. As in Bordeaux, with Burgundy, the vintage follows on the heels of a sensational 2009, where the red wines were ripe, forward and low in tannins. This comes on the back of a celebrated 2008 vintage and the now much-in-demand 2005—a year when the wines were described as immaculate.

Let’s start with the bad news. The crop is very small. A severe frost in December 2009, in which temperatures suddenly plummeted to minus 20 degrees Celsius, significantly affected the flowering. This was compounded by a spectacular storm just before the harvest, the following September, when hail, thunder and lightening destroyed yet more grapes and affected the white crop. The result is that volumes are down by as much as 30% to 50%.

And yet, as Roy Richards of U.K. wine importers Richards Walford & Co. observes, the very nature of the growing conditions—a cool August, poor flowering and low yields against all the odds—has produced wines that are high in acidity and freshness, silky tannins and beautifully ripe fruit. In short, the reds from 2010 are an absolute joy to taste—many on a par, if not better than, the 2009s. The best reds display lots of red fruit on the nose, such as cherry and raspberry, as opposed to dark fruit in 2009. While the best whites have incredible concentration and flesh on the palate; look out for Corton-Charlemagne in particular. Moreover, the high acidity will enable these wines to age for many years and develop unique and attractive tertiary notes. In short, they will become much more complex.

Certainly in the Côtes de Nuits, prices have risen—not as high as their counterparts in Bordeaux, but one wouldn’t rule it out in the future. My thoughts are that the next outstanding vintage—early reports indicate this will not be the 2011—will see significant price rises. So for the collector, where does the value lie?

Village wines and straight Bourgognes are a good start, especially from reliable producers such as Bachelet Monnot, Tollot-Beaut, Sylvain Cathiard, Jean Grivot, Ghislaine Barthod and Cécile Tremblay. Two appellations that really stood out were Corton-Charlemagne for the whites and Pommard for the reds, the latter showing exceptional refinement and grace. Beaune is also an appellation that offers good value for money. There are a clutch of producers, such as domaines David Clark, Eric de Suremain, Hubert Lamy and Sylvain Loichet, whose prices remain at the affordable end of the spectrum. Sadly, with demand rising for a finite number of wines, I suspect this might be the last vintage of exceptional quality that remains within the boundaries of affordability. But such is the devotion to this region, many will continue to buy them anyway.

Write to Will Lyons at wsje.weekend@wsj.com