Here We Go Again: Value Bordeaux 2015
BY NEAL MARTIN |
Sometimes you have the feeling of going around and round and round again. Having tasted the wines in barrel during primeur, I first reviewed the 2015 Bordeaux wines in bottle at the Cru Bourgeois tasting in London back in September last year, then at the Grand Cru Classé at the annual UGC tasting the following month. In January I spent two weeks re-tasting those same wines plus dozens more down at properties in Bordeaux, before joining HMS Vinous.
Here, I offer 100-odd tasting notes with a promise to re-review, or in some cases, re-re-re-review the Grand Cru Classé and First Growths in the coming weeks. It’s like Groundhog Day. Stuck in a perpetual cycle of tasting 2015s, it sounds like a plotline of Black Mirror, though Charlie Brooker’s dystopian world would see me stuck forever re-tasting the worst of the 2013s. This article focuses on “affordable” Bordeaux. You could buy some of these with a twenty-dollar bill and still come home with change. It is my first report to offer Vinous readers my take on the 2015 vintage. In the coming weeks we will publish my reviews of the Grand Cru Classé and First Growths.
The 2015 Growing Season
Readers will be aware of my affection towards the Bordeaux 2015s. It was not that the 2015 growing season was textbook, rather that at crucial periods Mother Nature was benevolent when she could have been less kind. In the early part of the season, just when the lack of rain threatened a repeat of 2003, the heaven’s opened. Flowering was even despite a heat spike and then rainfall in July came just at the right moment, when vines might have shut down. The important month of August was dry and warm and then a warm southerly breeze that some winemakers likened to a hairdryer, dried the vineyards after mid-September storms, thereby reducing the risk of grey rot. Then there followed a clement, benign period so that the harvest could be conducted at a leisurely pace without being forced into a picking window by the prospect of a low depression coming in from the Atlantic.
Value in 2015 Bordeaux
Subscriber Access Only
or Sign Up
This report, my first on the 2015 Bordeaux for Vinous, focuses on affordable wines. You could buy some of these with a twenty-dollar bill and still come home with change. I will offer my views on the Grand Cru Classé and First Growths in the coming weeks.
