Bordeaux 2025: The Weather
As with my early reports on the 2024 vintage, for 2025 I again provide a digestible one-page guide to the year’s weather, and how it has driven the style of the wines in this vintage. It is a unique year, the style of wine unlike any other vintage in recent memory.
During the course of all my visits in Bordeaux, Axel Heinz of Château Lascombes provided the best soundbite to sum up the vintage.
“In many vintages, Bordeaux has been saved from the disaster threatened by a cold and wet season by a sudden flourish of warm and dry weather at the end of the year.” Axel is of course referring to vintages such as 2002 and 2014, when a benevolent Indian summer finally brought the fruit to ripeness – or at least close to it. “But in 2025 it is the other way around – Bordeaux has been saved from the effects of heat and drought by a few weeks of cooler and fresher weather right at the end.”
There is perhaps a little more to it than that though. Let’s dive in with some detail.
The winter months provided some recharging of water reserves in the soil, as although rainfall in November was below average, December and January brought decent volumes of rain, matching the 30-year average. After lower levels of rainfall in February and March, the reserves were further topped up by heavy rainfall in April, as much as 70% (it varies between appellations) higher then the established average for the month. These groundwater reserves would carry many vines through to early summer, longer on those terroirs which can absorb and store water.
