Bordeaux 2014 at Ten Years: Left Bank
In my first set of tasting notes on the 2014 Bordeaux vintage, revisited at ten years of age, I focus on the major left-bank appellations. I open with a lonely couple of notes on the dry whites of Pessac-Léognan, before continuing with the red wines of that same appellation, and then those of the Médoc, starting with St Estèphe and heading south down to Margaux.
Looking to Pessac-Léognan first, I found a touch more gravitas compared to their peers, but not necessarily the perfume and elegance I was hoping for, in the wines of from Haut-Brion and La Mission Haut-Brion. The more weighty comportment of these two wines surely reflects the enhanced ripening that comes from the location of these twin estates in the urban microclimate of Talence, and it is admirable, but I found myself hunting hard for the aromatics I sought, especially in the latter wine.
Success is not restricted to the suburbs in 2014 though. The wine of Domaine de Chevalier, which of course has a rather more rural location, surrounded by misty woodland, also showed well, with a suave and silky character which calls to mind other more successful vintages from the modern era at this property.
While there are clearly some good wines waiting to be found in this southerly corner of Bordeaux, it is as we move north to the appellations of the Médoc peninsula that we find the real gems of the 2014 vintage.
Even very early on, at the primeurs in 2015 and at the tastings after bottling in 2016, it was evident that the more northerly vineyards had done best, with one very obvious reason for this; in a vintage marked by dreary and drizzly wet weather during the summer, the further north you went, the less impactful the rain, and comparing one end of the Route des Châteaux to the other, the vineyards of St Estèphe took a lot less water than those of Margaux. This finding was reinforced at this tasting at ten years of age, as the wines of St Estèphe put on a very convincing performance. The top wine of the vintage hails from this commune.
Having said that, the difference in quality between those wines tasted from St Estèphe and those from appellations to the south was not as stark as I recall. There was no sudden arrival of a heavenly chorus, no descent of archangels bearing pitchers of precious nectar, once we crossed the Jalle du Breil, the drainage ditch which marks the boundary between Pauillac and St Estèphe. Instead, here I felt there was a more graduated shift in quality, with more wines of good quality than I had expected to find in Pauillac, and also some in St Julien.
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