Bordeaux 2010 at Two Years: Vintage Soundbites
I hope my en primeur vintage reviews (always the leading article in the grey box, top right), increasingly detailed since I began reporting from the Bordeaux primeurs six years ago, are as useful to read as I find writing them. At the point of the primeurs, when the wines (if you can call them wines at this point – a pedantic interjection I suppose but well worth remembering) are only a few months old, a knowledge of the growing season, vineyard-by-vineyard in some cases, commune-by-commune at the very least, is extraordinarily valuable. It helps me understand the vintage, and ergo the wines.
Now at two years of age the wines are finished. They have seen out the requisite amount of time in barrel, and having been fined, filtered, fussed over and probably blessed by the local priest for all I know, they have now been sent on their way, like the prodigal son of biblical fables, eager to seek their fortune in the big wide world of wine. Well at least they should be; with prices so high, and rumours of large sales to Asia having fallen through, it may be that this vintage’s ‘prodigal son’ is exhibiting more typical teenage behaviour, and is in fact still tucked up in the cellars, refusing to get up, get a job or leave home. But I digress; my point is that, regardless of how well the wines may or may not have sold, they are now ready for tasting and rating on their own merits, and thus our assessment should now focus much more on the wines than on the weather. Even so, it is still useful to have some background context, and so here I will look at the salient points of the 2010 growing season.
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