Bordeaux 2013 At Two Years: Tasting the Wines
At this time, now that the élevage is finished, and the wines are in bottle (some only just, but some were bottled as early as April 2015, a very short élevage for cru classé Bordeaux and right bank wines of a similar level), we get our first glimpse of the end result of that dreadful 2013 growing season.
As I found during the primeur tastings, the majority of wines show no evidence of greenness. In the grandest appellations it is rare, cropping up now in just a handful of wines. On lesser terroirs, admittedly, such as Moulis and Listrac on the left bank, the style of the vintage does suddenly take a sideways swerve away from the crystalline and crunchy red fruit into something much more herbaceous and leafy. But if you stick to the grander terroirs, this isn’t much of a problem. The overall style is as previously presented, crunchy, gently ripe, but light and brimming with acidity. There is a very slight right-bank advantage, the earlier-ripening Merlot perhaps fairing marginally better than Cabernet Sauvignon, the perfume of the Cabernet Franc perhaps working in the right bank’s favour in this vintage, but it is not a significant difference. The Merlot may have been ahead of the Cabernets, but it was hit just as hard by the growing season, with old-vine Merlot bearing the brunt of the rain during flowering. As I said, it is a marginal difference.
Starting with the successes, those wines that appeal most are those where the extraction has been reined in, the focus has been on preserving the fruit rather than trying to attain a classic Bordeaux structure, and the élevage has been curtailed in order to avoid stripping the wine completely dry. These are wines which, at their very best, might match up to the sort of quality seen in 1994 Bordeaux or 2002 Bordeaux. Note that this statement does not suggest they will follow the same aging curve as these other vintages; although lighter, both 1994 and 2002 had enough substance and tannin to facilitate the traditional length of time in the cellar. That isn’t true of 2013, which has given us wines largely best drunk from release, perhaps over five years, with one or two exceptions that might go a little further than that. I merely mean to say that this handful of successful wines will give similar pleasure, in a very measured amount, over a much shorter life.
Please log in to continue reading: