Bordeaux 2011 Cru Bourgeois
Last year I attended the tasting of the 2010 Cru Bourgeois wines with some enthusiasm; in such a fine vintage, surely there had to be some Bordeaux bargains to be had? Perhaps my hopes were too high, as ultimately I felt many of the wines didn’t really live up to my expectations. This led to something of a discourse on the whole Cru Bourgeois system, the frequency of renewal of the classification (annual, which is too often), the apparently low bar for admission (the total number of admitted châteaux had risen every year since the system kicked off in the 2008 vintage) and the lack of granularity in the system (once over the bar, there was no further indication as to which were the best wines, and which had only just scraped in). The system seemed, to me, to be in need of some serious development; in short, a decent starting point, but more work was certainly required.
One year on, we now have the 2011 vintage classification on our hands, and no doubt next year we will have the 2012s to mull over. Unfortunately there has been little in the way of development, although that is hardly surprising; the wheels of French wine bureaucracy turn very slowly. The most significant change seems to be the inauguration of a neck sticker, which serves as a guarantee of both the quality and the quantity of wine produced. Each sticker includes a QR code which links to the Cru Bourgeois website (incidentally, visitors to the site not using a QR reader can type in a code from the sticker instead), providing the viewer with immediate information on the classification and the château and wine in question. This is a very welcome development, although I would have preferred to see more work on the classification itself. To my mind the system remains fatally flawed, and in the 2011 vintage that is even more evident than it was in 2010.
