Allen Meadows - The Man Who Gives the Little Hearts

For nearly fifty years, Allen Meadows has been the most respected single voice on Burgundy. His subscription site Burghound.com now holds over 125,000 tasting notes drawn from cellar visits across the Côte de Beaune and the Côte de Nuits, and his methodology is unusually transparent: cellar by cellar, on his own expense, with no subsidies of any kind, and notes assembled over five months of the year spent in Burgundy itself. His scoring is famously rigorous, his praise sparingly given, and the wine trade waits for his annual reports the way the financial world waits for the Fed minutes.

Within his reports, the symbol that matters most is the small ♥ he places next to certain wines. Meadows reserves it for those “particularly outstanding for their respective appellations and especially merit[ing] your attention”, and as a matter of policy, he never awards it to a Grand Cru, on the grounds that a Grand Cru should already speak for itself.

Across the six vintages of Domaine Alvina Pernot he has tasted, from 2018 to 2023, Meadows has written 82 tasting notes. Thirteen of those are Grand Crus, ineligible for the ♥ by his own rules. Of the remaining 69 wines, 54 received the ♥. That is just under eight in every ten, a strike rate difficult to match anywhere in the region, and harder still to match in a domaine’s first six vintages.