2+2=5: Bordeaux 2021 In Bottle 

BY NEAL MARTIN | FEBRUARY 22, 2024

Left Bank: Saint-Estèphe | Pauillac | Saint-Julien | Margaux | Moulis and Listrac | Pessac-Léognan and Graves | Left Bank Satellites | Sauternes

Right Bank: Pomerol | Saint-Émilion | Right Bank Satellites

Question: 2+2=?

Vinous readers’ hands shoot up in the air…

“Four!”

But what if the answer was five? Demonstrate all you want that this is mathematically impossible. Playing devil’s advocate, I reply in my best Orwellian voice: “Too bad. We have entered the realm of irrational mathematics. The rules and logic drummed into your malleable cerebral membranes at school no longer apply!” I don’t give any reasoning. To prove my case, you watch me place two eggs in an empty eggbox, then another two. When you glance inside the box, just like that, you count five eggs.

I stopped to snap this photo looking towards Le Pin on June 17, 2021 as dark skies gathered overhead, the settled spell breaking down. The clouds sum up the mood of some winemakers at the time.

You see, as time goes by—and it goes by at a rapid pace as you get older—I am coming to the conclusion that wine flirts with a similar kind of irrationality. In a rational world, we would examine the growing season and then add the caliber of winemaking to arrive at a number that denotes the quality of the wine. Simple. In reality, it doesn’t work that way. You know that already. Firstly, wine is a fickle and mutable beverage whose intrinsic qualities are perceived differently from person to person. Then, there are extraneous forces undermining objectivity, the stature of the critic dependent on their ability to hermetically seal off their judgment from influences. Likewise, it would be so much easier if warm and clement vintages with rain at optimal moments manifested superior wines vis-à-vis cold and wet seasons without exception. That serves as a convenient rule of thumb, but alas, it is not a given. Off-vintages can bestow wines that give immense pleasure and can sometimes seem…irrational. Like 2+2=5.

This brings me to the 2021 Bordeaux vintage because, on paper, a cursory glance at the troubled growing season would make any rational person dismiss its wines. “What a load of rubbish,” someone opined to me in Bordeaux. “It was impossible to make a good wine in 2021.” He assumed that the litany of woes that beset winemakers could lead to only one result in the glass, that any bon mots ascribed to the vintage was puffery, which admittedly the Bordelais are prone toward.