Bordeaux 2013 at Four Years: St Estèphe to Margaux
In this first of my region-by-region reports for the 2013 vintage in Bordeaux reassessed at four years of age I begin in the northern reaches of the Médoc peninsula, in St Estèphe, progressing southwards towards the city of Bordeaux though the appellations of Pauillac, St Julien and Margaux, with a lone representative from the Haut-Médoc appellation thrown in at the end.
Looking back two years to the tastings of the wines just after bottling, many then failed to live up even to the slight potential suggested by the barrel samples, a problem that seemed more prominent in this vintage than it has in other recent years. Revisiting the wines today, perhaps unsurprisingly my new opinions of the wines correlate best with my notes and scores from my assessment of the wines after bottling rather than with my opinions on the barrel samples. If there is a trend in any direction though, it is downwards. Only one or two wines were scored a half-point higher than I have rated them in the past.
There are a lot of fairly uninspiring and mediocre wines here, wines which offer delicate fruit, fresh acidity and light, faded structures. They would be best drunk now, or very soon. Many (in my opinion) should have been declassified into the second wine and sold off at a correspondingly mediocre price, perfect in that context for early drinking, perhaps in the restaurant trade. As it is, what we have here are wines that are on the whole underwhelming, yet which still wear the very grandest of labels, and which have fairly grand prices to match.
