Bordeaux 2010 at Two Years: St Emilion
The most multi-faceted of all Bordeaux’s communes, the wines of St Emilion in the 2010 vintage are as mixed as ever. This was something I highlighted in my primeurs report, when the commune gave us every conceivable style. From Château Ausone there was needle-like purity and precision, the wine rising up to a finely defined point in the midpalate, before slowly fading away. There were also wines more typical of the vintage, more robust, loaded with substance and texture, and destined for the long haul; these included Château Cheval Blanc. That these two wines showed such distinctly different styles, despite both being mostly Cabernet Franc (55% and 56% respectively) showed the danger of extrapolating from technical data to the palate.
The latter style was the one that dominated, the wines of purity sufficient to mirror that found in Ausone tending to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, other wines from the Vauthier portfolio, although Château Figeac showed similar lift and definition (although certainly not the same pure tension as found in Ausone). A number of wines that showed the substantial composition found in Cheval Blanc did it well, but unfortunately many offered a caricature of it, with soft and chewy palates underpinned by a rigid tannic structure. These are signs of the difficulties of the vintage, enhanced by a little locally-traditional over-extraction (or vice versa, perhaps!).
