Bordeaux 2013 Primeurs: No Tannins, Thank You
The second broad generalisation about the 2013 vintage in St Emilion is that many estates seem to have handled the extraction of tannins very well. This is an appellation where a handful of châteaux are well known for turning out wines of huge extraction, imbuing them with towering columns of tannin for structure. The style is occasionally combined with poorly defined fruit profile, a consequence of long hang-time and desiccation at picking, giving the wines a fudgy, indeterminate fruit flavour. Of course, the latter was pretty much impossible in 2013, as rot drove picking on the ‘fresher’ side of ripeness. But there was still the potential for over-extraction of course, undesirable in any vintage, but especially so in a year marked by under-ripe tannins and lean textures. The risk is that you end up with unbalanced wines, thin and weedy, yet filled with harsh, grainy, green tannins.
Remarkably, I did not find the tannins in St Emilion in 2013 to be much of a problem. Sure, there are one or two wines where extraction has simply been pushed too far, but on the whole the wines I tasted achieved a greater balance than they have done in some recent vintages. And where there were tannins, they were not as green or grainy as I had feared. This was most notable at the St Emilion Union de Grands Crus tasting where, as was the case in the corresponding St Julien event, I found myself tasting sample after sample of dark, flavoursome, light but fruit-rich and nicely balanced barrel samples. The fact that a couple of the usual extraction culprits, Château Larcis Ducasse and Château Pavie-Macquin, were not at the tasting probably only helped to bolster this sensation of appropriate balance. Proprietor Nicolas Thienpont seems to have withdrawn his wines to his little château on the hill, so it looks like I will have to add yet another appointment to my already hectic schedule to my primeurs assessments if I am to pick up these wines in the 2014 vintage.
