Bordeaux 2017 Primeurs: Pomerol
I had barely touched down in Bordeaux when I met up with Hubert de Boüard de Laforest, best known for his tenure of Château Angélus of course, but in his role as a consultant working largely on the right bank he has his finger on the pulse of a large part of Bordeaux. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the conversation turned immediately to the frost. And I mean immediately; with eight days of tasting ahead of me (the equivalent of two working weeks if you ask some), I was eager to get to grips with the vintage. “Over in Pomerol it was terrible”, he told me. “The vineyard was green at the centre, but down the slopes it had turned black”.
About a week later (my usual schedule sees me start and finish on the right bank), I spent the best part of a day in the appellation, visiting all the leading domaines. After starting my day down at the Moueix offices on the Pomerol quayside, the Dordogne not breaking its banks and threatening to sweep away my hire car this year (I may be exaggerating a little here), I hotfooted it up to Vieux Château Certan, to taste with Guillaume Thienpont (pictured). He put some figures to Hubert’s broader description.
“Of the 800 hectares in Pomerol, only 200 hectares at the very centre, across the dome of Pomerol, escaped”, said Guillaume. “Down the slopes, there were about 300 hectares that were part-frosted, and then in the very lowest parts there were another 300 hectares of vineyards that were completely frosted. So only 200 out of 800 hectares went undamaged. I think the worst situation to be in was when your vineyard was half-frosted; you ended up with two generations of fruit in the vineyard, sometimes even two generations of fruit on the same vine, to sort through”.
I have presented data on yields in most of my 2017 primeurs reports so far, in order to illustrate how much damage the frost caused, and Pomerol isn’t going to be let off the hook (even if it can make for painful reading). The figures here back up the tale of destruction presented by Hubert and Guillaume. The average yield in Pomerol in 2017 was just 23.9 hl/ha, little better than the 21.7 hl/ha recorded in St Emilion in this vintage. This is the lowest yield here for many years, far below the yield recorded in 2016 (44.4 hl/ha) and also far below the five-year average (38.6 hl/ha).
