Bordeaux 2019: the Covid- delayed initial en primeur verdicts are in – at last!
Jane Anson provides comprehensive guidance on the vintage and highlights her top-scoring and best-value selections from around the communes
In a heat-driven year, local conditions dictated the success of individual estates in 2019, yet favourable comparisons are being made with top vintages of the last decade or more. Despite the trying circumstances, Jane Anson in the end tasted more than 900 samples – here she selects 125 of her top-scoring and best-value wines from across the appellations
What a year, frankly! I have never tasted more en primeur samples, nor in a more unusual way. The final count is somewhere close to 1,000 wines, where in a typical year I will taste about 600 to 700. The vast majority at my house – my garage became like the demilitarised zone; there was a drop-off system that respected safe distancing, where I left the bottles for 24 hours to give the barrel samples a chance to settle, and I then gave the bottles an extra clean before tasting – perhaps 20 individual château visits, and even one in a local café, empty but for us.
The timing of the tastings was more spread out than usual, obviously, starting from a few weeks into lockdown in March/April through to early June, and I re-tasted a far higher number of wines than usual, as samples continued to arrive through different consultants, groups or direct from the estates.
I can unhesitatingly say that 2019 is a successful vintage in Bordeaux. I wrote my first overview of the vintage in mid-April, after tasting about 150 samples and speaking with various stakeholders, from professors to winemakers. And 850 samples later, my positive feelings about the potential of the year have only risen.
This is good news, because there is plenty of wine out there. Production in 2019 was at 486 million litres, close to the 10-year average and just below 2018.
As usual, I don’t give perfect 100-point scores to wines tasted en primeur, but scores of either 98 or 99, written as 98-100, mean that they are absolutely at the top of the scale, and may be upgraded when re-tasted in 16 months’ time after bottling.
I also want to underline that the Decanter 90-94pt bracket means Highly Recommended, and that I try to leave the 95-plus only to truly exceptional wines. This means that one clear suggestion for readers is to look out for 94pt wines – my ‘strong buy signal’ level that indicates extremely high quality, a brilliant spot where you’ll often find some of the best buys in the vintage. I’m thinking of Châteaux Batailley, Gloria, La Dame de Montrose, Pédesclaux, Phélan Ségur and Saintayme, among many others.
2019: the weather
Overall, a hot vintage with all the successes and pitfalls that this style of year brings with it; rich fruits, concentration, high alcohols, plenty of tannins. The top wines on the Left Bank seem less lush but more structured than in 2018, so closer to 2016 in style, but there is less consistency than in 2016 as you move down the rankings. The top Right Bank wines seem closer to 2018 in style, rich and lush in many cases, although with slightly higher acidities.
Hot topics
As has been the case for the past few years, a dry summer meant potential heat stress, particularly for young vines and sandy soils, and I did find prune and fig notes on occasion, so look out for this. The age of the vines makes a difference to being able to withstand the heat of the summer – and classified estates tend to have older vines, partly because they do not machine harvest and so the vines get less of a battering. Often, machine harvesting means that vines tend to need pulling up and replanting after 30 years or so – yet another
Jane Anson is Decanter’s Bordeaux correspondent, and was recently named Online Communicator of the Year in the 2020 Louis Roederer Awards. She has lived in the region for 17 years and writes a regular column for Decanter and a weekly column for Decanter. com. An accredited teacher at Bordeaux’s Ecole du Vin, her book titles include Bordeaux Legends: The 1855 First Growth Wines, and Inside Bordeaux (£60, BB&R Press, April 2020) an in- depth study of the region
‘I can unhesitatingly say that 2019 is a successful vintage in Bordeaux’
way in which the classified estates have an advantage over mere mortals. But in terms of what that means for us as buyers, there is less consistency away from the big names.
As an aside, I think we are going to have to get used to that. The idea of a globally successful Bordeaux vintage such as 2005 or 2010 becomes less realistic now that we are seeing summers of increasing extremes, whether it be rain or drought or heat. And it means that more and more we will see 5-star vintages only in certain areas, while other parts of the region can only manage 3 or 4 stars.
It underlines the approach that the Institute of Vine & Wine Science (ISVV) takes, whereby they don’t give vintages overall star ratings, but rather look at how individual areas react at specific moments in the year – from flowering to fruit-set to colour-change, final ripening and harvest. The understanding that things are more nuanced across Bordeaux according to soils and microclimates is likely to become even more important over the next decade, as is the realisation that cooler spots or areas with fresher soils will become increasingly prized.