Bordeaux 2013 at Four Years: Pessac-Léognan to Pomerol
In this second of my region-by-region reports on the 2013 vintage in Bordeaux revisited at four years of age I present my tasting notes for a selection of wines from Pessac-Léognan, to the south of Bordeaux, before moving across to the right bank to check out the wines of St Emilion and Pomerol.
The wines here struggle to impress just as much as those of the Médoc peninsula, tasting notes on which are presented in the previous instalment. Starting here in Pessac-Léognan, while there are some competent efforts, wines that we might even regard as impressive taking into account what a dreadful washout vintage this was. Having said that, there are no wines here that demonstrate intrinsically interesting quality, unlike the Médoc where a couple of wines were at least vaguely interesting.
It is in St Emilion that we find another of the 2013 vintage’s genuinely interesting red wines, in the shape of Château Valandraud (pictured). With a convincingly darker hue in the glass than most, a little more saturated with pigment than the vintage’s more usual insipid style, and with flavours of currant, damson and varietal fruit cake, as well as a nicely developed structure, this is like the wine of Château Pichon-Baron, in that it actually tastes like wine. And that’s quite unusual in this vintage.
