Bordeaux 2014 at Two Years: St Emilion
As already mentioned (not quite ad infinitum, but it is getting close) in my previous reports on the 2014 vintage now it is in bottle, this is a year in which the character and the quality of the wines were determined by the wet summer weather. Specifically, July was wet, August was also wet, and cooler than expected temperatures didn’t help. This certainly seems true on the left bank, where there seems to be an association between lower levels of summer rainfall and good quality (in St Estèphe and the Médoc). Those appellations with higher rainfall have turned out some attractive, lean and cooler styles, but they are less convincing on the whole.
So how did St Emilion fare in 2014? We have here different soils, classically clay and limestone, but also sand, and gravel too. And we have different varieties, Merlot and of course ever-increasing plantings of Cabernet Franc in some of the best vineyards. And we also have a different context. Looking back at preceding vintages (but skipping 2013, a grim year for which comparisons are fairly pointless) the 2012 vintage was much more favourable to St Emilion than it was to the left-bank appellations, simply because the Merlot was picked before the rot really took hold in the vineyard. In the 2014 vintage, however, the earlier picking of Merlot picking was a disadvantage, because the need to pick the fruit arrived before the berries had fully dried out after the vines soaking up all that summer rain. As for Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, these were disadvantaged in 2012, picking having been driven by the advance of the rot. But they had an advantage in 2014, in theory at least, because these varieties ripen later than Merlot and thus the fruit stayed out on the vines for longer, taking advantage of that late Indian summer.
Perhaps the best physical example of this came at Château Cheval Blanc, where chef de culture Nicolas Corporandy (pictured) described fat Merlot berries, larger than usual, with a yield of 37 hl/ha. Then they picked the Cabernet Franc, the berries smaller than usual, the yield reflecting this, being just 28 hl/ha. The Cabernet Sauvignon, admittedly, he wasn’t keen on at all, as he feels the weather did not hold long enough for it to ripen fully, and he found it a little green.
