Bordeaux 2025: The Wines
I landed in Bordeaux during the second week of April 2026, and having rested for one night the following morning I headed for my first day of tasting, which included a large selection – more than 80 wines – from one of the region’s leading négociants.
I sat down to taste, half-expecting rich and velvety wines in the style of 2022, or maybe 2009, with soft structures and low acidities. I expected rather blowsy if not flabby whites.
I was soon disavowed of these expectations.
The wines of 2025 are nothing like those from 2022, or 2009, or 2003, or indeed any other vintage you care to mention. It is a unique year which defies any such comparisons. I guarantee you have never tasted wines like these before. Well, maybe I shouldn’t make such guarantees, but I know for certain that I have not tasted wines like these before.
I must reiterate that this is a heterogeneous vintage, with some châteaux and some appellations having done better than others. Having acknowledged this fact, this does not mean the vintage is resistant to a few caveated generalisations.
The overarching style of red wine in 2025 is a hybrid of warm and cool, bringing together the best of the early and late season conditions. The best wines are filled with rich, powdery, finely grained and tight-knit tannins ripened by the warmer weather. These tannic structures can be absolutely delicious. On the whole, despite the character of the fruit (thick skins and little juice), you don’t find overly tannic wines; extractions have been tempered to suit the fruit. As for the flavour profiles these are also ripe, with dark fruits, currants, blackcurrants, blackberries, griottes, olives and the like in abundance, with mineral and dry herb components. Some wines have more red-fruit profiles, dark cherries and red plums, but what you don’t find, on the whole, is fragile or crystalline fruit, or overpowering herbaceous character. That warm summer weather developed flavours and burned away the methoxypyrazine greenness.
All of which sounds like a warm, ripe, tannin-rich vintage, does it not?
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