Bordeaux 2014 Primeurs: St Julien
Turning now to St Julien, this appellation received more than its fair share of my attention during the primeurs tastings, as I have retasted more wines here than I usually would. The reason for revisiting so many of the wines was that on my first encounter with them they seemed very cool, lean and crunchy in style, with a little less texture and substance than I saw in Pauillac, and certainly much less than in the confident wines of St Estèphe. I had gone straight from a joint Pauillac and St Estèphe tasting (where many of the wines seemed fine, within the context of the vintage at least) to a St Julien tasting (where everything suddenly seemed rather more lean and steely). The two tastings were just down the road from one another, literally ten minutes apart by car, so one can’t blame the weather, atmospheric pressure, my mood, the biodynamic calendar, ley lines or a misalignment of influential heavenly bodies. Even though the vineyards of St Julien and Pauillac are directly contiguous the former was lagging behind the latter. In short it seemed like the wines of St Julien just weren’t up to scratch in the 2014 vintage.
Nevertheless I still doubted my findings, which I guess comes with the job, and so I was glad to be able to retaste many of the wines the following day. This more or less confirmed my initial findings. Perhaps ‘steely’ was a little cruel though; the wines have freshness and life but they do have charm and a little substance too, but on the whole it certainly was looking as though the châteaux of St Julien weren’t able to turn in quite the same level of performance as seen in Pauillac this year, and the wines were certainly less convincing than the rather appealing wines of St Estèphe.
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