The 1976 vintage in Burgundy will be remembered as the year of the great drought, a scorching and dry summer having produced atypical and powerful wines. The reds (Pinot Noir) are very ripe, deeply coloured and strongly tannic, endowed with remarkable concentration but also with sometimes hard and drying tannins, the result of water stress, with fine expressions in the Côte de Nuits (Gevrey-Chambertin, Vosne-Romanée, Chambolle-Musigny). The whites (Chardonnay) are ample and rich, from Meursault to Puligny-Montrachet, but their often-lacking freshness has made them more fragile. Evolution proved unpredictable: some reds have held magnificently, others have dried out. They should now be assessed on a bottle-by-bottle basis, with the finest retaining real substance. Between the difficult 1975 and the modest 1977, the 1976 remains a sun-drenched, tannic parenthesis.