Bordeaux 2010 at Two Years: Pessac-Léognan, White Wines
When the world talks of Bordeaux, it talks of red wines. But there are also some very fine white wines made here, and of course some iconic sweet wines as well. Last year, when tasting the 2009 vintage, I chose to overlook the white wines at the annual Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux tasting in order to focus on the red wines. That was not a decision I took lightly, as the red wines already receive more than their fair share of the limelight. Nevertheless, when there are well over one hundred wines lined up for tasting, and only a few hours to do it in, something has to give. I usually only little more than half of the wines available. In the 2009 vintage, a warm year which was not ideal for white wines and yet has undoubtedly given us some of the most remarkable red wines of recent years, it seemed reasonable to focus my attention on the reds.
In this review of the 2010 vintage, however, the situation is very different, on at least two levels. First, as I have explained in my introduction, although warm and dry 2010 was not a torrid or heat-wave vintage. This was not an early-harvest year, akin to 2003. It was a vintage marked by drought but not by extreme temperatures, the nights were cool, helping to preserve the acidities in the fruit as it ripened, and so the conditions were as favourable to white as they were to red, perhaps more so. And although the final few weeks in September were particularly dry, weather which certainly had an impact on the character of the red wines, the white grapes (for the dry wines) had been picked by this time anyway. This is a year which fans of dry white Bordeaux should certainly not ignore (the same is true of sweet white Bordeaux, but more on that in a subsequent report).
