Bordeaux 2018 Primeurs: Primeur Picks
In this year’s primeurs report, on the 2018 Bordeaux vintage, I have presented my tasting notes and scores on 458 wines (yes, I managed to keep count this year) tasted during the course of two weeks in the region. And, having combined five of these reports into two new ones, The Rest of the Left 2018 and The Rest of the Right 2018, I have reduced the overall number of regional or appellation-based reports from fifteen down to twelve. The aim was to more rapidly finish the publication of all my reports, before the vast majority of wines have been released. Hopefully I have achieved this.
With that in mind, before picking out my favourite and likely best-value wines, based on my now well-established system of Dreams, Sense and Reality (admittedly some of which is based on a bit of guesswork given that we don’t yet know the prices of many of the wines) think I should first reflect for a moment or two on the vintage, its style, and the absolute quality of the wines compared to other vintages.
In doing so I will attempt to address these three questions;
Bad, good or great? Left bank or right bank? Better than 2016?
Many have used the term “heterogeneous” to describe the 2018 vintage, myself included, but it is worth remember that at the primeurs, the 2017 vintage at times came across as two vintages mixed together in one. The first sample could be dark, richly ripe and delicious, made from carefully selected fruit which escaped the frost, while the next might be lean, green and mean, and clearly made from a crop where there was no distinction made between first and second generation bunches. Now that was heterogeneous. Yes, the 2018 vintage is also heterogeneous, but with the overall quality shifted up compared to the previous vintage, and with a gradation of quality rather than 2017’s bipolar character.
