Every year O W Loeb offer a selection of Bordeaux en primeur. Here begins the 2010 Campaign seen through the eyes of our MD Chris Davey (please contact us if you would like to be added to our email list for updates).

 

Conclusions and vintage report.

 

It's Sunday the 10th of April.  We flew back to Gatwick from Bordeaux on Friday afternoon, and what a wonderful flight it was.  I had the good fortune to have a window seat on the port side, and, as it was a beautifully clear day, I could sight-see the whole way.  The Médoc was mapped out beneath us just as Hugh Johnson had drawn it a few decades back, the mouth of the Gironde, the Ile de Ré, Jersey was picture-perfect, then the Isle of Wight: what a great pleasure flying can be under such conditions.

 

Anyway, enough wittering, what of the 2010 vintage?  Before forcing my conclusions on you I thought I would set the scene with a VINTAGE REPORT: 

There is a chap called Bill Blatch who runs a Bordeaux brokerage, and writes a phenomenally detailed vintage report each year.  He is trusted by the UK trade and has built a fine reputation for in-depth analysis, honesty and straight-talking over the years.  I shall be shamelessly dipping into his report, but I hope he will forgive me for trying to condense his 12 pages (of A4) so that you can get to the end without nodding off.  However, I would like to pirate his opening paragraph in its entirety:

"2010: An embarrassingly good vintage

Back in November many owners were already quietly confident that their '10 was better than the already legendary '09 but, coming hot on the heels of the hallowed 2009s, they seemed embarrassed to say it too loudly.  Today, half of Bordeaux is less timid in assessing '10 as being as great as, if not better than '09, whilst the other half is more reserved in such a judgement.  But there is one point of total agreement: it is totally different from its predecessor."

 

How does 2010 differ from 2009?  In brief, more alcohol, more tannin, more acidity - especially more acidity.  And how did 2010 achieve such quality?

2009 had a perfect growing season of gradual and steady ripening throughout, leading to even ripening and progressive concentration and development of flavours right through to an ideal harvest.  The 2010 season was more problematic, more staccato, with uneven ripening and a certain amount concentration-through-drought.  However, critically, August and September were relatively cool, whilst remaining dry and sunny.  These cooler temperatures (especially at night) explain one of the key signatures, if not the key signature of 2010 - a wonderful, enlivening acidity which renders the most interesting wines to be delightfully fresh and balanced, despite epic amounts of tannin, and sometimes alcohol to boot.  2010 is big in every aspect, and therefore - where the vigneron has hit the nail on the head - balanced and in harmony.

 

To the detail of the growing season: winter 2009/10 was cold (an advantage, as all gardeners will know, forcing vines into full dormancy and killing off bugs and diseases) and very wet, especially early on.  This was a saving grace for the vintage, as reserves of water were well replenished ready for the drought which would follow.  In detail, November saw double the usual rainfall, whilst December to February saw normal precipitation, but very low temperatures (as low as -7 C) and snow lying on the ground for a week in early January - and remember this is a maritime climate, five hundred odd miles south of our south coast.

 

March also started unusually cold, with a series of frosts which delayed the vines' early spring development and, very early on, precipitated a late season.  The second half of March saw the whole month's average rainfall, maintaining those all-important reserves of water.  April dawned cool and damp; indeed, I was there, tasting the 2009s.  It was a good thing the wines were so exciting, for the weather was just foul this time last year - horizontal rain and chilly.  Bud-burst did not really kick in until mid-April last year as a result.  By contrast, this past week we had wall-to-wall sun and, despite delightfully crisp mornings, remarkably warm daytime temperatures.  Indeed, in the car park at Château Margaux last Wednesday afternoon the car thermometer registered 33 C!  It had been parked in full sun though.  The result?  This year the merlots already have 1 to 4 inches of growth and plenty of leaf, whilst the cabernets were beginning to burst - so I can tell you that 2011 is already a  good 10 days ahead of 2010! 

 

Later in April 2010 temperatures rose sharply, but then dropped off again in early/mid May, only to roller-coaster back up to unusual heights later that month.  May also turned out to be something of a drought-month.  All this confused the vines, and produced short, sharp bursts of growth, followed by near dormancy.  Luckily, despite chilly nights there were no late frosts. 

 

However, flowering was not smooth; it started in the last week of May as temperatures continued to rise.  The weekend of 5th June proved to be a scorcher, further promoting the flowering, but during the night of Sunday 6th June the temperature plunged back down to 10 C, which heralded a week of showers and further low temperatures.  This in turn led to varying proportions of failed flowers, and as a result we were informed that final yields were down in 2010 by anything from a few percent right up to 40%.  Not good news for those of us who were hoping for a massive harvest of decent wine in the (no doubt vain) hope that it would moderate prices.

 

From the 20th June true summer finally arrived.  Late June was hot and very sunny.  The sun continued on through July and August, with a sneaky 2 hours more sunshine in those two months than in the exceptional 2009 season (but that's 2 hours on 532!  Mind you, the 2009 total of 532 hours is fully 50 hours above the average....or so Mr. Blatch tells me).  July was the hotter of the two months, with fresher air moving in for August.  And here lies the real key to the vintage  - oodles of sunshine to promote photosynthesis, and thereby ripening, without the heat that burns the essential acidities.  As for rainfall, the whole period was officially a drought, with only 11 days during the two months seeing any rain at all, and then they were only brief, light showers.

 

The nights of mid-August saw temperatures as low as 10 C, which is quite extraordinary.  The bright sun and very dry conditions continued right through to September and beyond.  However, despite the drought, all but the youngest vines (with undeveloped root systems) thrived, as the coolish temperatures minimised evaporation, and the underground water reserves were so healthy in the first place. 

 

But despite the vines continuing to photosynthesise, the drawn out flowering led to uneven ripening.  The solution to this problem was provided by the perfect weather continuing well into October, thereby allowing diligent proprietors to pick plot by plot at perfect ripeness.  That perfect ripeness led to merlots, in some areas, above 15%, and cabernets as high as 14.5%.  However, with clever blending of plots and varietals, the highest right-bankers (where merlot is king) will probably touch 14.5%, whilst the richest cabernet-based Médocs will be in the 13.5 to 14% bracket.

 

Harvesting of the early merlots started around 25th September, with the cabernets following from the end of the first week of October.  There was rain on the 4th October, but that only served to refresh the vines.  Otherwise, despite building cloud, the harvest was brought in under excellent conditions.

 

To summarise: 2010 readings (from official analyses) against 2009 give us the following comparisons

                  - anything up to double the level of tannins, but wonderfully ripe tannins which support, give texture and are a pleasure

                  - a good 1% more alcohol - not in itself a positive, but you would be amazed at how cool and juicy the good 2010s are despite this

                  - anything up to a gram per litre more of total acidities.  That may sound small, but it equates to about 30% more than in 2009.

 

How does this analytical data add up in the tasting room?  Very well indeed!   After the wonderful run of sales that all us merchants had last year nobody but the suicidal is going to start downplaying the quality of 2009 in order to focus your attention on 2010.  But I will, with great confidence, state that 2009 and 2010 have produced many of the all-time best quality wines for a pair of back-to-back vintages in the long wine history of Bordeaux.

 

What are the potential pitfalls to look out for? 

                 -alcohol levels which are out of balance with acidities, leading to 'hot' finishes.  Lesser right bank, merlot-based wines are the most likely culprits

                 -over-extracted wines.  The tannin levels are so gargantuan that any winemaker who works by the book rather than trusting his own palate (and who has been brainwashed into thinking that we want black wines from Bordeaux) will have produced massively unbalanced monsters which will never, ever make good drinking!  The berries were small in 2010, thanks to the drought.  Therefore skin to juice ratios were naturally very high, meaning that light extractions (the working of the fermenting juice and 'cap' of skins, pips and stalks to extract flavour, colour, and structure) were the order of the day.  The major culprits here were the village of Margaux (excluding the top properties - although I have to say that I feel they have partially learned their lesson from the nonsenses that so many of them produced in 2005) and, above all, the less well managed crus bourgeois of the Médoc and Haut-Médoc.  Here there were literally scores of absolute shockers, as I mentioned in Bulletin 3.

 

Recommendations?  Well, I can't see prices coming down (great quality, short crop, and Bordeaux was full of Chinese last week...) so prices will be an issue, but there are truly wonderful wines in 2010.  Wines of the vintage?  Well I think it has to be a joint award, a Mr and Mrs award - Margaux for femininity, and Haut-Brion for masculinity (and I should say that I did not manage to taste Pétrus, VCC, or Ausone).  Lafite and Latour came a very honourable equal third.  

 

However, there are also supreme examples at (slightly) less elevated levels:

Lynch-Bages

Las Cases

Grand Puy Lacoste (so fresh and charming, a miracle bearing in mind the tannins)

Montrose

Pontet-Canet

We did not taste (sadly) at Calon-Ségur, but I hear great things of it.  Also we have a suspicion that our sample of Ducru was not showing at top form.  I gave it a good note (no more), but later that day someone told me that the previous week the wine had been tasting brilliantly, and when he retasted the same day as us he found that the fruit had closed - so reserved judgement there.

 

What about the lower orders?  We will not be offering the same large array of petits châteaux and crus bourgeois that we offered last year.  There are some truly lovely wines to be had, where the producer - through luck or judgment - appears to have done the right thing at the right time, but we did not find them in the profusion that we found them in 2009.  This rather goes to underline the fact that 2009 was a much easier growing season, and that 2010 posed questions, but questions which if answered correctly have led to great quality.

 

Left bank, or right?  This is difficult.  There is greatness on both sides, and disasters as well.  Overall, the alcohol of the merlots leads me to favour the left bank, but that is a big generalisation and there are many honourable exceptions.

 

Thank you for your time and support.  Happy hunting!

The OWLoeb

2010 Bordeaux Bulletin

Number 3       Date: 07/04/11

 Have you ever tasted gossamer drenched in wild raspberry juice?  I have.  It's called Château Margaux 2010.  Jeremy Palmer and I had the enormous pleasure of tasting at this iconic property yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon.  Paul Pontallier and his team have produced a simply sublime wine in 2010, and it was an honour to be able to taste it.  Still, I suppose I should not harp on about it because even if you will be able to afford it, we probably won't be able to buy enough to offer it to you.  Such is life.

 

Mind you, Margaux is not the only wine of ethereal beauty to come out of 2010.  Jeremy and I have had the great good fortune to taste all the first growths in the last three days: Lafite, Latour, and Mouton on Tuesday, Margaux on Wednesday, and Haut Brion today.  All five have shown us completely different aspects of the greatness of Bordeaux.  Only one of them disappointed (relatively speaking); we tasted it on Tuesday, and its name does not begin with L.  Otherwise, these were wines of sublime beauty and purity, which managed to combine elegance with strength in a way that it is difficult to communicate through the medium of words.

 

The Margaux was - as we would hope - the most feminine of the five, showing delicate nuances of flavour wrapped up in a structure of pure silk.  The Lafite was my wine of the vintage.....until I tasted Margaux; it was luminous blue/black in colour, it coated the palate, it was tight and closed, but so intense, and it left the palate simply ringing with flavours for minutes after.  Then Latour came along with its swaggering masculinity and swept all before it.  Last year I thought Lafite had donned the mantle of Latour, and vice versa.  In 2010 they are both very comfortably dressed in their usual attire.  Today at Haut Brion we were again treated to true greatness; a wine of such intensity that it puckered the lining of the mouth. During my lengthy note I wrote "This is very great", and underlined it.  What truly amazing wines, and how wonderful to see the 1855 first growths still performing so magnificently.

 

So, we have undoubtedly tasted the sublime;  sadly we have also tasted the ridiculous.  During the primeur week for the great 2000 vintage, in April 2001, I remember I was very pleased with myself for gate crashing a journalist-only tasting (yes, those of us who put our money where our mouth is are regularly treated less well than those with a mouth) of all the crus bourgeois of the Médoc and Haut-Médoc  - over 200 of them.  I diligently ploughed my way through scores of decent wines, and came up with half a dozen or so real winners which we duly sold to you, and which you can now start to enjoy (names like Cambon la Pelouse, Paloumey, and a number of other unknowns, or at least they were then).

 

These days the annual cru bourgeois tasting is open to the trade, but having spent two hours of my life there this morning I do wish that they had not been so indulgent of us grubby tradesmen.  What a sad array of nonsensical offerings they were.  Jeremy and I did not manage to taste all of them (in excess of 200, again) but we had a good stab at it, and only one wine drew enthusiastic notes from both of us - Margaux's ancient Tour de Mons property (more of that anon).  One or two other wines drew half-hearted praise; all the others provoked rank condemnation, with notes as brief and explicit as 'awful'.  And yes, I am being serious.

 

However, this outbreak of extreme mediocrity amongst the 'bourgeois' has nothing to do with the vintage you will be glad to hear; it has everything to do with blinkered stupidity and massively misdunderstood faddishness.  The problem is over-extraction.  Certain winemakers in Bordeaux think that extraction (the active working of the macerating skins to extract colour and tannin) is what the punter wants, because one market, and certain journalists working in that one market have said that is what the punter wants.  But they are misguided.  The resultant wines are black and dead looking, have no nose, no fruit on the palate, no subtle nuances, complexities, or aromas, and leave your mouth feeling as if someone has just shoved the rough end of a scaffold plank into it - comprehensively.  Mmm, the joys of being a wine merchant.

 

I despair, I really do.  Out of an enormous chai full of hundreds of bottles from an extremely good vintage, especially noteworthy for its vibrant, fresh, enlivening acidity,  you could count the wines worth drinking, or would ever be worth drinking, on the fingers of one hand.  Well, half a hand actually.

 

To end on a more positive note, at beer o'clock yesterday evening Jeremy and I steeled ourselves to taste yet more 2010 claret in the tiny central Bordeaux office of an old mate who works as a local broker.  He knew that we would be out on our feet and desperate for something more refreshing than young claret, so mercifully he had lined up a mere 10 wines for us to taste.  His strike rate was impressive; both Jeremy and I loved four of them (luckily the same four!), and they will all feature in our offers when prices start to trickle out.

Time for bed!

The OWLoeb

2010 Bordeaux Bulletin

Number 2       Date: 06/04/11 (just)

It's 12.05 am, and I have just finished my first full day of tasting the 2010 Bordeaux. I am here with Jeremy Palmer for the rest of the week - we are on a mission to discover if the vintage is as good as 'they' say it is. I am in my shoebox of a room in the Hotel Normandie in the absolute heart of Bordeaux town. 

  A couple of weeks ago I sent you a little missive saying that I had tasted, in London, thirty 2010 wines from the 'Cercle de Rive Droite', a group of growers from the Fronsac, Castillon, Pomerol and St. Emilion - ie merlot-dominated - appellations.  I mentioned that, whilst they were all strapping, ripe, fullsome offerings, I did find some of them to show alcoholic 'heat'.  Well, those of you with gaps in your cellars, but not in your wallets, will be delighted to hear that hasty judgements, made on incomplete knowledge, can prove to be misleading.  I have had rather a good day!  I have tasted widely and well in the upper reaches of the Haut-Médoc, where the cabernet sauvignon is king, and I have to say that I do not remember tasting such a vibrant balance of acid, tannin, ripe fruit, and alcohol in Bordeaux - ever!   Yes I know, you are groaning and shouting 'not again, go away'; indeed, I feel the same.  But the truth is the truth.  There are magnificent wines in the Haut-Médoc from the 2010 vintage.  We started this morning (very late, as my old route out of town has been totally set on its head by the Mayor's system of one-way streets, no left turns, and 100 tonne trams) at Xavier Borie's wonderful Grand Puy Lascoste in Pauillac.  Monsieur Borie always has a ready smile, and his three wines (Lacoste-Borie, Haut Batailley, and GPL) soon put a smile on mine!  The crackling freshness of this trio, combined with succulent blue/black fruit ripeness, was a true wake-up call to the possibilities of the 2010 Bordeaux vintage.  The day progressed through a veritable roll call of the greats: Montrose, Pontet-Canet, Lafite, Mouton, Lynch-Bages, Pichon-Lalande, Latour, Pichon-Baron, Léoville Las Cases.  All served to underline, to a greater or lesser extent, my initial impression: 2010 has the potential to combine freshness with total ripeness, massive but very ripe tannic structure, goodly doses of alcohol, fabulous colour, brilliantly elegant, complex, and expressive aromas and flavours, and, probably, frightening prices.  It is now 5 to 1.  I think I had better rest my poor old palate, ready for another onslaught of crisp, crunchy delight in the morning (and I am not talking about corn flakes) - assuming I can manage to navigate my little Fiat Punto out of town. Good night.

Chris Davey  

The OWLoeb

2010 Bordeaux Bulletin

Number 1       Date: 31/3/11

……..2010 Bordeaux looks as though it really is going to be rather interesting!

 

Last Thursday evening ‘le Cercle Rive Droite’, a group of Bordelais châteaux owners from Fronsac, Castillon, Pomerol, Lalande de Pomerol, and St. Emilion and its satellites presented 30-odd cask samples of their 2010 produce to the UK trade and journalists.  An interesting development in itself, in that it precedes the Bordeaux-based Union des Grands Crus shindig by a matter of weeks (the wine world has been invited to Bordeaux for  barrel tastings during the week of 4th April).

 

The wines shown in London last week were, to a “man”, very deeply coloured (colours varying from very deep ruby/purple to black), richly-fruited, powerful, ripe, structured, and all-round impressive.  Many of the wines also showed remarkable character and expression for such very young samples, rudely ripped from their dark resting places and flown all the way to London to be paraded in the glare of publicity.

 

Of course all these ‘right bankers’ are predominantly merlot, and the merlot does have a tendency to produce unseemly levels of alcohol in a ripe vintage.  Sure enough, if I were going to level one criticism it would be that some of the wines did seem rather alcoholic, and therefore ‘hot’.  However, many others avoided this pitfall, and some even managed an element of finesse and detail to accompany ripe tannins and burly, super-ripe fruit.

 

We need to take a deep, long look at the all-important, cabernet-based left bank wines before pronouncing, but it could well be that, given the evidence seen so far, there will be great wines to be had from the 2010 vintage.  Sorry! 

 

I have to say that after the stiff (and occasionally absurd) pricing of 2009s, I was rather hoping for a large crop of middling wines in 2010 to take the heat out of the market.  However, 2010 is a short crop (following uneven fruit-set), and with this quality I cannot see prices easing I’m afraid.  Hey ho.

 

I will report back to you during (if I have the energy) and after ‘primeurs’ week.