SUPERLATIVE BORDEAUX GIVES 2020 A POSITIVE TWIST

A look at what the French wine region produced this year

We all know that the pandemic will make the 2020 vintage particularly memorable, but the vintage in Bordeaux will also be remembered because it produced so many outstanding wines under such challenging circumstances – from logistical shortages to severe drought conditions. In fact, 2020 is the third outstanding vintage in a row for Bordeaux and marks perhaps the first time the region has experienced such a high-quality trilogy of superlative years.

Jamessuckling.com rated 1,302 barrel samples from the 2020 vintage and conducted almost 40 Zoom calls from Hong Kong with chateau owners and winemakers, and the story behind the 2020 vintage is a fantastic one. It was not only our biggest en primeur tasting ever, but perhaps even the biggest for any wine critic. The outstanding quality of so many of the wines highlights the genius of Bordeaux viticulture and winemaking, as well as the incredible human effort and collective energy it takes to make so many terrific-quality wines.

“You had a new challenge every day, and it could be climatic or it could be sanitary,” says Veronique Sanders, general manager of Château Haut-bailly, who made one of the best wines of the vintage. “We had to keep our team working and that could be a challenge. Imagine what it was like when France was in lockdown in May and April!”

I think that we’re all going to be excited with what’s eventually bottled in Bordeaux from 2020. The reds show complex and intense aromas as well as bright fruit character, but also floral and earth undertones. This is something you don’t see in such young wine resting in barrels or other vessels in cellars. They also have intense yet fine tannins and relatively fresh acidity. They’re wines that can be consumed relatively young but will age very well after bottling.

Some wines are of really exceptional quality. In fact, I rated 10 wines with possible perfect scores of 99 to 100. That’s the third-highest number of top wines in the last 10 years for my en primeur tastings for Bordeaux and one of the highest in my career of tasting Bordeaux from barrel. By comparison, 2019 had eight wines with 99-to-100 ratings, and 2018 just four.

“We think that the 2020 is the best of the trilogy,” says Florence Cathiard, owner of Château Smith Haut Lafitte, who made one of her best wines ever. “It has the structure and the typicity of the 2018 and the aromatics of the 2019. So it takes the best of both.”

The best wines of 2020 also have a ripeness but slightly less alcohol than 2019 and 2018, because many wineries picked earlier and extracted less during fermentations and macerations, using lower temperatures and less pump-overs.

“It was crazy, crazy,” says Saskia Rothschild, head of the famous firstgrowth Château Lafite Rothschild, as well as Château Duhart-milon and Château L’évangile. The Lafite only has about 12.8 per cent alcohol, a good degree less than most recent high-quality vintages. “Everyone told us 2020 was hot and we measured the vats, and they were like what we knew

in the 1990s and 1980s. It’s very surprising. It’s about that paradox [of the vintage] that we talked about.”

The paradox is that Bordeaux experienced one of its most severe droughts ever during the summer, with almost 50 days of no rain – or only a few drops from about mid-june to mid-august. Most winemakers worried that they would have a high-alcohol harvest with shrivelled and sugar-rich grapes. Yet the wet weather during most of the first half of the year enabled the best vineyards with great soils to maintain moisture.

Large amounts of rain came in mid-august, but not enough negatively to affect the quality of the grape crop. The most important precipitation arrived in late September, but many of the top names on the Right Bank had finished their harvest or were very close to ending. This early and dry harvest delivered some impeccable merlot in many estates.

But don’t write off wines with a predominance of cabernet sauvignon in their blends. The cabernets were much smaller than normal, with thick skins, so the rains at the end of September didn’t negatively affect them in many areas or properties. Moreover, the cabernets in Pessac-léognan were super in 2020, which is why three out of my top 10 wines were from the appellation.

The question now is whether 2020 is better than 2019 or 2018. My impression after tasting so many barrel samples is that it’s certainly better than 2018 and at least at the same level as 2019 in quality. I’ll have to wait and see the wines in bottle to finally decide how they compare with 2019.