Bordeaux 2009 at Four Years: Sauternes & Barsac
I’m not exactly letting the cat out of the bag when I write that Sauternes has enjoyed an excellent run of vintages in recent years. The triple-whammy of 2009, 2010 and 2011 have given many of us – especially those who weren’t able to load up on the 2001 vintage, the greatest of all in recent decades – plenty of wines to choose from. Maybe it is just as well we have a few good years to choose from, because this run of great vintages came to an abrupt end with 2012, a vinetage in which more than one or two wines – including some very famous names – were marked by the wrong kind of rot. I hope the selection of the final blends for some of these châteaux have been more judicious than for the en primeur blends (which were fairly shocking in a handful of cases). That is a question for another day though (I will see when I revisit 2012 later this year) and right now it is 2009 that is up for discussion. In this report I look at a dozen wines from this vintage.
What was it that made 2009 such a fine vintage for Sauternes? You might well ask, because it is not always the case that top quality red and Sauternes vintages go together. It is not unusual that we get one or the other, such as in 2007, which was great for Sauternes, the wines just getting better and better with every taste, but it was a weak vintage for reds. As is always the case, it was the humidity as harvest approached that did the trick; the region enjoyed the same long, warm and dry summer as the rest of Bordeaux, but come late September and early October two bands of rain swept across Sauternes and Barsac, in each case followed by a period of warm and dry weather allowing for dehydration and concentration of the fruit. Warmer weather after the second set of rains increased the urgency of the pickers, before the potential alcohols climbed too high. By the end of this tri, more than half the fruit had been picked, and what remained came in during late-October. There were at least four tries on most estates, but it was the first two that contributed most to the assemblage, and by and large they were of very high quality.
