Bordeaux 2013 Primeurs: AC Bordeaux
A highlight of a my visit to Château Cos d’Estournel is an opportunity to taste the white wine, which is tasted – wisely, in my opinion – after the reds. These days (by which I mean in the last two vintages) the red wines are themselves fresher, with better balance, and so perhaps the white isn’t quite the contrast it was when the reds were more extracted and over-done, as they were a few years ago. All the same, the white wine – which actually comes from the Goulée vineyards in the Médoc – still makes for a welcome change in a week of tasting mostly red wines.
This year the wine tastes as good as ever; having said that, although it started life in 2005 it has only been poured during the primeur tastings since the 2011 vintage, and so I only have experience of it in very recent vintages. Nevertheless, the 2013 seems to stand up very well to the 2012 and 2011 tasted at this stage. It has a broad seam of confident fruit, and plenty of vigour and life. Chatting with manager Aymeric de Gironde and winemaker Dominique Arangoits about the style of the wine they were aiming for, however, I was surprised to hear they were hoping to find more purity in the fruit, and greater minerality too. The former they are already achieving, but the latter is possibly a futile task.
First the easy part, fruit purity; Aymeric and Dominique (pictured) recently decided that “breaking the juices” would improve the purity in the wine. No, I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about either, and so they were kind enough to explain. Their previous practice, having pressed the fruit and obtained the juice, was simply to transfer this into barrels for the fermentation. What they do now, however, is divide the juices of any one pressing into three portions, the first pressing, the middle part, and the final pressing.
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