Bordeaux 2021 Cru Bourgeois at Two Years
In this third and final (for the moment – you don’t get escape that easily!) Cru Bourgeois tasting report I come to the most recently bottled vintage, 2021.
In contrast to my reports on the 2019 and 2020 vintages, two growing seasons which both presented the Bordelais with challenges but where the end result in each case was broad success, the story of 2021 was quite different. Having just returned from two weeks in Bordeaux revisiting the vintage, I was reminded of just how 2021 stopped the run of über-successful vintages from 2018 to 2020 in its tracks. The end result is huge variability in the quality of the wines in this vintage – at all levels, from the big guns down to the Cru Bourgeois ranks – and this was seen at this tasting.
In this report as usual I present a very brief synopsis of the vintage, restricting myself to a trio of paragraphs (easily skipped, should you wish to get straight to the tasting notes), and of course I provide a run-down of the wines, with all my tasting notes and scores. As this is the concluding instalment of this report, I also ask what might come next for the Cru Bourgeois candidates, as 2024 sees the various châteaux of the Médoc peninsula submitting their dossiers for the next iteration of the classification, to be revealed to the world in 2025.
Vintage Recap
The growing season in 2021 lurched from one agricultural insult to another. The frost came first; a mild winter and early budburst preceded several days of dramatically low temperatures on April 3rd, with April 6th and 7th the worst nights. Vines in Graves, Sauternes and more peripheral right-bank appellations were worst hit, resulting in catastrophically low yields in some zones (several Sauternes châteaux reported yields of just a few hundred bottles, rather than hundreds of hectolitres). And some made no wine at all.
