Bordeaux 2018: Broad Impressions
When I boarded my flight to Bordeaux for the 2018 primeurs I felt that this might be an easy vintage to summarise. After all, aside from those who lost out to mildew or hail, the warm and dry weather would presumably produce a slew of delicious, high scoring wines. Wouldn’t it? Just like, as I suggested in my opening paragraphs, the 2016 vintage.
As it turns out, while it has been very easy to pass ten days (my longest primeurs trip ever) in the region tasting the wines, the samples generally rich, ripe and no hardship to taste, the vintage is much more heterogeneous than you might expect. In fact it feels remarkably complicated, so much so that I am a little uncertain on how to succinctly get across the character of this vintage and its wines. One thing is for sure, again as I intimated in my opening paragraphs, this is no straightforward repeat of 2016, a vintage which gave us fresh and digestible wines of modest alcohol levels.
I will start with a few generalisations on the red wines, before looking at the major Bordeaux regions a little more closely. Firstly the wines on the whole are rich in tannins, so much so that after a few days of tasting my mouth was sore with the continued tannic onslaught. The tannin quality is undeniably quite lovely, velvety and cashmere-like at times, but there is a lot of it, which after a while has some impact. As an aside, many times in the past I have tried to get across some notion of the phenolic concentration within a wine with the Indice de Polyphénols Totaux (IPT) but you will find this year I make no mention of it in my tasting notes, as I have come to the conclusion that the correlation between the IPT and how a wine tastes is so weak it is a rather useless piece of technical data.
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