Bordeaux 2013 at Two Years: Sauternes & Barsac
Thankfully I can conclude this report on Bordeaux 2013 on a high, with the wines of Sauternes and Barsac. While the red wines are, for the most part, totally washed out by the dreadful season, the sweet appellations seem to have flourished. While rain saw a gloomy-grey wall of rot advance through the vineyards of Pauillac and St Julien, St Emilion and Pomerol, and pickers swarmed from the cellars into the vineyards to bring in the fruit before it succumbed, in Sauternes and Barsac worried frowns slowly broke into smiles.
The rain arrived in these regions in mid-September, and picking began on the 25th, this first tri blending into a second tri which was prompted by rain later in the month and the warm, humid weather that ran into October. After heavier rain on October 3rd there was more botrytis and a third tri kicked off during the second week of the month. After some scattered rainfall a fourth tri right at the end of the month brought the harvest to an end. The first two tries were of a somewhat higher quality than the second two, and importantly – after the disastrous 2012 vintage – there was the promise of some delicious wines. That promise was evident during the primeurs, and tasting the wines from bottle now I am delighted to see that the quality of the vintage seems to have come through in the finished wines.
This was a highly selected group of wines, and so it is important not to get carried away. The wines here all come from classed growth estates, mostly premier cru, with only a couple of deuxième cru properties and another couple which are not classified, one of which was Château de Fargues which regularly turns out wines of classed growth standard anyway. I only point this out because looking back to my primeur notes, while the wines at this level were indeed full of promise, lesser names struggled somewhat, giving us wines with less confident residual sugar, and firmer acidities. It is a vintage in which you need to stick to the big names you are familiar with, rather than investigating unfamiliar châteaux I think. Leave those adventures to years such as 2009 or 2010.
