Bordeaux 2009: The Best Ever?

Rarely has a young Bordeaux vintage been so much fun to taste as 2009. There’s a lot to be said for not having the enamel stripped off your teeth during a long day’s tasting of hundreds of young wines. Actually, with 2009 Bordeaux, the challenge was to resist drinking the samples, as they were that flattering and sweet.

The hallmark of this outstanding vintage, which many experts (though not all) have gone on record as describing as the greatest of all time, is the unique combination of fine ripe tannins and sweet creamy flesh offset by lively acidity. It’s the acidity of the ’09s that makes the wines of this vintage so different from any recent great year (think of an ideal blend of 2005, 1990 and 1961). If anything, the best wines of 2009 have a vaguely Burgundian quality to them, as difficult as that may be for the Bordelais to stomach! In my experience, this Burgundy quality is only to be found in great vintages. While it’s not too difficult to get powerful, balanced wines from cabernet and merlot in good vintages, it is a much rarer thing to unite the brute force those varieties are capable of achieving with the dainty, almost ethereal aromatics and gentle tannic architecture of 2009. And the best Bordeaux of 2009 are indeed wines of uncommon power, charm and perfume.

But 2009 is not a runaway success, as there are many disappointing wines and overall quality is lower than, for example, 2005, the other great recent vintage to which ’09 is being widely compared. The 2005 wines are big and sometimes brawny, with impressive tannic structures, and the vintage is essentially a major success across the board: one famous vigneron, who asked not to be named, recently told me that “you would have had to be a complete idiot not to make a great wine in 2005.” But the 2009s could not be any more different in style. They have just as much strength lurking beneath the surface, but they are infinitely more charming and flattering wines. In fact, all that glossy, ripe, creamy fruit in many cases can make the ’09s seem almost too easy to drink and lead people to question their aging potential. But while 2005 produced many more good to very good wines than 2009, the latest vintage may well have yielded more superstars, with numerous estates making some of the finest wines in their history.

What the proprietors and the winemakers say. Of course, such distinctions are lost on the Bordelais, who have a new vintage to sell. Jean-Louis Triaud of Château Saint-Pierre joked about the fixation wine writers and collectors have with great vintages: “Sure, 2009 is better than 2005. But of course it is: I have ’09 to sell now! And let me tell you,” he laughed, “next year’s vintage will be even better.” In fact, nearly everywhere I went during the two weeks I spent tasting the 2009 Bordeaux, the song remained the same, with nearly everyone agreeing that ’09 will go down in history as one of the greatest Bordeaux vintages of all time. According to Jean-Philippe Delmas of Château Haut-Brion, “The ’09s are the richest wines we have ever made, but despite this richness the wines are balanced and fresh. That is the key. Making a big, rich wine is now possible for almost anyone, but to make one that is also balanced is another story. And that to me is the real magic of 2009.” Pierre Lurton at Cheval Blanc echoed those words: “In 2009, even though the wines are very powerful, there’s a cashmere-like feel to the tannins. It was the long growing season, with cool nights and dry fall weather, that allowed our grapes to reach optimal ripeness.”

At Château Margaux, Paul Pontallier felt the same way: “I remember being very impressed with the first vats of cabernet sauvignon. They reminded me a lot of those of 1990, although in 2009 there was much more concentration. On the contrary, the merlot had me worried, because I thought it was a little rustic and too alcoholic. But by judiciously blending the two varieties in the right proportion, I feel we made excellent wines of great breadth and length.” Michel Rolland, the renowned winemaking consultant and owner of estates like Châteaux Le Bon Pasteur and Fontenil on the Right Bank, put it bluntly: “Quite simply, 2009 is the best Bordeaux vintage I have ever worked with.” According to Frédéric Engerer, estate manager at Château Latour, “It’s important that those of us lucky enough to have tasted these wines early as futures offerings fix them in our memory, because 30 years from now this will still be the vintage by which all new ones are measured.”

Denis Dubourdieu, renowned enologist and owner of a number of Bordeaux estates, told me, “The grapes in ’09 were so spectacular I actually called my father out to the vineyard to see them, and he said he had never seen such beautiful grapes before in his life.” Still, Dubourdieu cautioned, “It wasn’t all great, though: while I was happy with the Sauternes vintage from the outset, I can’t say the same for the reds. There was a lack of water at times, and those dry spells caused physiological stress in some vineyards that led to the formation of dry, rustic tannins.” Another dissenting voice in the general hoopla over the ’09 vintage was that of Jean-Hubert Delon of Léoville-Las Cases: “The harvest date was critical this year, and the farther north you went in the Médoc the more difficult it was to ripen fruit properly.” Thomas Dô-Chi-Nam, technical director at Pichon-Lalande, put another spin on it: “This was a year in which you needed to be very selective in order to make the greatest wine possible, but the vintage allowed you not to be.” This is a critical point when analyzing why some 2009 wines are just very good instead of stellar: some producers were so enthusiastic about the quality of the grapes, they may have put too much of their fruit into their grand vin.