Bordeaux 2016 at Two Years: Pauillac
While Pauillac has given us some good wines in both the 2014 and 2015 vintages, such comments come with a note of reserve, caution even. While it has become increasingly apparent that a small handful of wines from this commune in the 2014 vintage are flirting with excellence, most carry a slightly lean streak which can be traced back to the cool and damp summer. And in 2015 rain around the time of the Cabernet Sauvignon harvest had a tangible negative impact on quality. The wines are very good in many cases, where the terroir was favourable, but they miss the character of a truly great vintage. They are like an olympic hurdler who executes a potentially record-breaking run, only to clip their heel on the final hurdle, or a darts player who throws a near-perfect round of darts only to miss the bull’s eye by a whisker on his final throw. In each case the end result is still worthy of admiration, but any hope of achieving true greatness has been lost.
In the 2016 vintage, however, in Pauillac (and in some other left-bank communes) we have wines made by people who have mastered the art of hitting the bull’s eye while setting new olympic hurdling records at the same time. This is a vintage which comfortably wipes the floor with every vintage in recent years, certainly everything since 2010. Indeed, some of the wines here compare very favourably to 2010 and 2009, because whereas those wines impressed with their cellar-worthy tannin profiles (2010) and luscious creamed-fruit substance (2009), 2016 has something even more valuable, which is an exquisite freshness and sense of balance. This is a truly great vintage for Pauillac, and indeed for much of Bordeaux.
I don’t intend to discuss every wine in detail, my tasting notes below should serve that purpose. I cannot, however, fail to mention the 2016 from Château Mouton-Rothschild, a superb wine which presents a compelling style, contrasting substance and perfumed mineral-laced fruits against a serious structure which, despite the wine’s elegant poise, seems ready to melt into the background even at this early stage. This is a truly great wine from this estate, which will give Mouton fans a huge amount of pleasure. And to be fair the wine of Château Lafite-Rothschild provides essentially the same impressive quality, although I could not bring myself to award quite the same score. As with the 2016 from Mouton, this is a wine which impresses with a lithe and sinewy rather than fat substance, a very serious and reserved style which deserves decades in the cellar to reach its apogee.
