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Bordeaux 1994

Following the dreadfully disappointing trio of vintages from 1991 to 1993, the Bordelais were desperate for a successful year. With the 1994 vintage it seemed, at least at first, that this was to be the case. But in Bordeaux, nothing can be taken for granted. My vintage review below gives a brief summary of the characteristics of the vintage, and there are links to my tasting notes to the right.

Vintage Review

Following the 1993 vintage Bordeaux experienced a mild winter, and the vineyards sprung into life earlier than expected during the spring; indeed, it was one of the earliest flowerings to date for the region, and subsequently the developing vines basked in the warm summer weather as the fruit was set and started to swell. July and August were both warm and favourable, and as always the hopes - of both the vignerons and the consumers - were raised. After two washout vintages in 1991 and 1992, and the initially promising but ultimately disappointing 1993, everyone was looking for a good vintage. Fruit analyses carried out by the Oenology Faculty at Bordeaux University in mid-August suggested that even more was possible, as they likened the fruit to that analysed during the 1982 and 1990 growing seasons. The hyperbole that surrounds Bordeaux vintages of modern times is not such a new phenomenon, perhaps!

With the benefit of hindsight we can now see how foolish these less than hesitant predictions were. Even without tasting any wines, an inspection of the meteorological records for the region should be enough to raise our guard. On September 7th, only a week or so after the parallels with 1982 and 1990 had been drawn, the heavens opened, bringing an unwanted deluge to the region, and it continued to rain non-stop throughout the next two weeks. Any chance of a top quality vintage soon dissipated, along with the hopes and dreams of the winemakers. There are always exceptions though; estates that pulled out all the stops to extract the best quality possible from the vintage, or perhaps succeeded through a more serendipitous route. the red wines would always be worth investigating, with earlier-picked fruit brought in before the harvest - especially the right bank Merlots - perhaps holding the greatest promise. The left bank should not be ignored though. As always, you have to taste the wines to know for sure!

Tasting the Wines

Despite these harvest difficulties there is indeed success in 1994, to my palate at least. It is something of a polarising vintage I have noted, with those looking for leaner and more savoury wines much more likely to find pleasure than those more familiar with 21st-century Bordeaux, and all its fleshy substance and sweet fruit.

As a consequence of this polarising nature, an overview of published critical assessments inevitably reveals a broad spread of opinion, with some critics viewing the vintage as a good source of classically styled, tannic wines, which have good structure and which will come good with time in the cellar, whereas some think of them merely as overly-tannic, harsh and charmless. I find myself somewhere between the two camps. I cannot apply the blanket description of 'charmless' to the vintage as I have certainly found some wines with charm. Moreover, a number of wines I have tasted display a healthy structure, substance and quantity of fruit. They do not necessarily have all the sweet flesh, gobs of fruit, Asian spices and painful pain-grillé that can be found (and indeed some people seek out) in modern-day Bordeaux, but for many of us these are not features that define whether or not the wines are worthy of drinking.

That is not to say I am in complete denial about the 1994 Bordeaux vintage; there are certainly some wines out there which are rather hard and ungiving, a feeling engendered by an excess of drying tannin in these cases. Prominent tannin is a problem shared with the 1986 vintage; in both cases the simple fact is that this should improve with cellar time, and we can only hope that the fruit holds out as the tannin slowly melts away. Following the basic tenet that tannic Bordeaux needs appropriate time in the cellar has, in my experience of many wines from the 1994 vintage, brought dividends. A number of wines have required fifteen years or more to soften (and some are still following that path), but they have come good in the end. Ultimately, despite being derided by many critics, the vintage has in fact given many of us exactly what we want; proper, old-school Bordeaux, savoury and elegant, violetty and bright rather than powerful and sweet, and capable of fitting in seamlessly with a meal, rather than overpowering all the flavours on the table in an anabolic frenzy.

The communes that fared best in 1994 were Graves, Pomerol and the top left bank villages. Indeed, I have had some superb white Graves from this vintage, not least from Château de Fieuzal. The reds from these regions can also be very good, with the usual suspects such as Léoville-Barton, and the freshly revitalised Pontet-Canet - this vintage marked the beginning of an amazing about-turn for this latter estate - all showing well. Other more exalted names, such as Cos d'Estournel and even Vieux Château Certan have not produced the most enthralling wines. Nevertheless, many can provide some pleasure; the tasting pages, linked at the top right of this page, should provide some examples of wines drinking well (and in some cases not so well), in a number of cases looking at the same wines at several different points along their drinking trajectories. (7/7/04, updated 24/5/07, 23/8/11)