Bordeaux 2011 at Two Years: Pessac-Léognan, Red Wines
Although the white wines of Pessac-Léognan were strong for the vintage, the red wines do not fair so well. Despite the region being rich in desirable gravelly terroir, no estates have really managed to turn out a wine to challenge the quality produced further north at, for example, Château Palmer, Château Montrose, Château Cos d’Estournel or Château Mouton-Rothschild. The best terroirs have turned out the best wines, but whereas in some other communes the top wines are very appealing, here they are merely good. Put another way, although there are some good wines here, this is one of the least convincing vintages for the top estates of Pessac-Léognan that I can recall tasting, and there are better performances in many other recent vintages.
The region suffered the same weather as elsewhere in Bordeaux, a warm spring, a cool summer save for the mini-heatwave in late June, and then a warmer period again leading up to the early harvest. The problem which resulted from this very erratic weather pattern was significant heterogeneity in fruit ripeness, together with burnt and shrivelled berries where they had been exposed to the heat in June. The work carried out during the selections at Château Haut-Brion is indicative of the difficulties of the vintage. This was only the third year in which the estate employed optical sorting, but it was the first year in which it made a significant contribution to the quality of the finished wine. Whereas in 2009 and 2010 the optical sorting had not excluded much after the manual sorting, in 2011 a further 5% was jettisoned, with the Cabernets harder hit than the Merlots. Despite this, the blends tended towards higher proportions of Cabernet Sauvignon.
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