Bordeaux 2013 at Ten Years: Right Bank
In the third and final (is that a sigh of relief I hear?) instalment of this vital look back to the 2013 Bordeaux vintage, I finish up with a slew of wines from the right bank. In St Emilion we have the likes of Château Ausone and Château Cheval Blanc, while representing Pomerol we have the crème de la crème, in Petrus, Château Lafleur and Château L’Église-Clinet, to name just three. I also finish up here with a couple of wines from Barsac; obviously these don’t hail from the right bank, but it made sense to slot them in right at the end.
The older Merlots were particularly hard hit by the weather during the flowering, with obvious implications for the leading right-bank appellations, yet at ten years of age the wines here do not feel qualitatively different to those from the left bank in this vintage. They display, as a group, a very similar stance, which is lean and light, with a gentle evolution of aroma and flavour, and with fully resolved or lightly grained tannic structures on the palates. Having said that, there are a small handful of stand-out wines which are head-and-shoulders above their peers, the equal or even superior to those made on the left bank.
In terms of quality, Pomerol leads the way, first with the 2013 Château L’Église-Clinet, made of course by the late Denis Durantou. There are not many barrel samples which remain lodged in my memory banks ten minutes after I taste them, never mind ten years, but I can still remember tasting this wine with Denis back in April 2014. It was like a wine from a different vintage, with a convincing structure and a core of textured fruit, a good wine set adrift in a sea of mediocre samples. It was, for me, the wine of the vintage, and it is reassuring to see that now aged ten years it is still putting on a good show. In the context of the vintage of course. On this occasion, however, the 2013 Château Lafleur also equipped itself well, so a tip of the hat to the Guinaudeau family is also warranted.
