Who’s Laughing Now? Bordeaux 2022 Revisited
Do you see yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I mean to do battle with them and slay them.
– Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, 1605
Who’s laughing now?
– Abe Simpson shouting at clouds, in The Simpsons, Season 13, 2002
The 2022 Bordeaux vintage is surely the most fascinating of recent years, and perhaps the best example of why – while weather charts and harvest reports are useful – you can only judge a wine by tasting it.
Everything about 2022 seemed to say these wines should be hot and baked. The summer was marked by persistently warm and dry weather, with several powerful heatwaves along the way. The harvest was thus unsurprisingly early, the pickers heading out into the vines three weeks ahead of the norm on some vineyards. The first right-bank Merlots were ready before the end of August, unheard of at the time, with many châteaux reporting their earliest harvest ever.
As an aside, just four years later, these records have already been broken. First in the 2025 vintage, and early reports from the 2026 harvest indicate these records have fallen again. But these are two stories for other times.
Keeping with the 2022 vintage, I first tasted the wines in April 2023, and I was blown away by the purity, fruit expression and floral fragrances I found in the first few samples I encountered. They were nothing like the hot and baked wines some had predicted. They were simply glorious, dark and textural, yet perfumed and precise. And those first few samples were from the northern Médoc! Something of a workhorse appellation, the Médoc tends to produce wines of rustic frame and leafy flavours, and is not exactly renowned for its elegance, tension and grace. And yet that is exactly what I found.
While it seems an obvious truth, I still feel the need to say this: the only way to judge a wine is by tasting. A weather report provides a fabulous insight into the vintage and gives detail of the DNA that made the wines. But the only way to know a wine is to taste it. To pronounce on a vintage – as some do for Bordeaux – without travelling to taste is to be Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. You see things which aren’t there. Continue doing this long enough and you end up like Abe Simpson, who was revealed – in Season 13’s The Old Man and the Key – to have a reputation for shouting at clouds. In the end, nobody listens to you.
Which is why I always taste before I give my opinions, and once I have done that, taste again. And again. It’s better than being a Don Quixote. Or an Abe Simpson.
With these thoughts in mind, I gratefully accepted an invitation to revisit the 2022 vintage earlier this year, courtesy of London merchant Justerini & Brooks. This is my third look at the vintage, the first being at the primeurs back in April 2023, and then again at the end of 2024, after the wines had been bottled. Obviously, of the three tastings this is the smallest, but it is useful as it includes some serious benchmarks for the vintage, including Montrose, Pichon Comtesse, Léoville-Barton, Brane Cantenac, Cheval Blanc, Figeac and L’Église-Clinet among others.
