Bordeaux 2023 at Two Years: Pomerol
When on the right bank of Bordeaux I often find myself flitting between St Emilion and Pomerol, my complex schedule of visits interweaving appointments in the two appellations according to the availability of the of technical directors, proprietors or cellar masters who host the tastings. I try to keep it to a minimum, for a variety of reasons (time, the cost of fuel, the environment) but over the years I have come to accept every right-bank day will have a degree of flipping and flopping between the two.
So it was unusual, on my first right-bank day of visits, at the end of week one, to find myself almost exclusively in St Emilion. It was no hardship of course; St Emilion has given us an array of excellent wines in the 2023 vintage, with the likes of Cheval Blanc, Ausone and Figeac (obvious choices I know, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles) leading a large pack of top-performing châteaux. I had just two brief visits in Pomerol, with most of my tastings concentrated on one day in my second week of visits.
This means I had been in Bordeaux for something like nine days before I spent any meaningful time in Pomerol, almost an entire day of visits. And what a day it was. Pomerol is no less convincing than St Emilion in this vintage, which puts many of its wines ahead of their left-bank counterparts. I enjoyed tasting my way around the appellation, in a sequence of visits during which I encountered a smorgasbord of top-notch and frankly delicious wines.
Let’s take a look at some of the top performers.
Looking back at my primeur notes, now that I have returned from my two weeks of tasting, I see there were a couple of properties I rated very highly indeed at that early stage. This only serves to highlight the vagaries of barrel samples, and the value of ranged scores for unfinished and unblended wines, because while those two properties have made super wines which justify their high barrel sample scores, neither ended up as one of my very top choices now that the wines are in bottle. Both have been leap-frogged by their near neighbours.
