Bordeaux 2013 at Two Years: St Julien
During the primeurs tastings I came away feeling that, while the quality of the barrel samples up and down the Médoc were a certain and very straightforward reflection of the vintage, those presented in St Julien had perhaps one tiny iota of superiority.
It was not that the wines were superb (far from it), but they seemed to have a little more charm and gentle succulence than some of their neighbours to the north and south, and the commune as a whole felt that touch more consistent. This seemed especially true with the third and fourth growth estates, and as I recall Château Beychevelle, Château Branaire-Ducru and Château Langoa-Barton all presented some appealing barrel samples.
Nearly two years on, the wines all in bottle, it sadly seems to have been a downhill journey for many of the wines of this commune. While there are some wines here that will make delicate and appealing lunch-time drinking, many fail to live up to the gentle promise they hinted at when I was tasting en primeur.
Looking to some of those third and fourth growth estates first, barrel samples that seemed full of fresh and delicately pointed fruit vibrancy during the primeurs, in the intervening eighteen months between tastings these wines seem to have rapidly tired. In some I suspect the élevage has been too much for the wines. The fresh but delicate fruit, largely pure in terms of flavour and free of green herbaceousness, the one really positive feature of the vintage which Philippe Dhalluin so rightly identified (as noted in my 2013 Pauillac report), has been eaten up by too long in barrel. What texture they had, which was rather subtle to start with, seems to have dried out. In short, these wines feel much less successful than they did during the primeurs.
