Bordeaux 2010 at Two Years: Sauternes & Barsac
Having cantered through the many red wines, and those few dry whites from Pessac-Léognan, it’s time now for a first look at the wines of Sauternes & Barsac now that they are in bottle. The Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon vines destined to give birth to these wines require a different set of circumstances than their dry-wine counterparts, and as I promised in my introduction I will take a fresh and more detailed look at how 2010 rolled out for these wines here.
Through spring and summer these vineyards thrive or suffer with the rest of Bordeaux; their flowering is no less impaired by cold weather or rain, and they are just as susceptible to mildew. Happily there were no such catastrophes in 2010, and as the year marched on the vines looked healthy and slowly began to grow and ripen their bunches of fruit. Towards the end of the growing season, however, is where their needs begin to diverge. With my romanticist’s hat on (perhaps a rather relaxed and over-sized velvet beret, adorned with a few ostrich plumes….sorry, I digress), the botrytis is purely the result of the hazy morning mists engendered by the Ciron, which brings cold waters from the Parc Naturel Régional des Landes de Gascogne from the south, and which dissects the sweet wine vineyards, Sauternes to the south-east, Barsac to the north-west. In truth (removing the hat now) the rise in ambient humidity generated by an autumnal rain shower is perhaps just as important, perhaps even more so. Not too much, of course, as prolonged or recurrent downpours will simply convert the bunches of grapes to a useless mass of grey rot. And then, once the botrytis has down its work puncturing the grape skins, you need drier conditions to dehydrate the fruit. This is often expressed (reaching for my velvet beret once again) as a requirement for sun-baked afternoons after those misty mornings. Again, being more pragmatic (beret off), there is nothing more beneficial than a little dry wind to dry out and concentrate the berries.
