2005 Petrus

"We were extremely interventionist in 2007," said Christian Moueix, who is always a candid source of intelligence on a new crop of Bordeaux wines. "We had a strange feeling from the beginning that the vintage would be difficult. In fact, we had a poor summer even if actual precipitation totals weren't that high. But the constant sprinkles kept restarting the vegetation each time: the energy of the vines was not going into the fruit, and some wines have a vegetal taste. The wines lack the spark of the sun; our wines cannot shine without sun." Moueix's team spent an extra 20,000 person hours in the vineyards in 2007, doing three separate crop thinnings, then removing leaves on the south and west sides of the vines on August 20 in the hopes of catching more sun, which, luckily, came out in full force in September. "Some of our wines give the illusion of maturity," said Moueix, "but perfect maturity was impossible to achieve in 2007. There was never really a perfect time to pick in September, and then we had some rain again in early October." Moueix summed up: "We had a wide range of almost-ripeness in 2007. The wines are what they are."

Christian Moueix's well-publicized strategy of harvesting on the early side in 2005 was a popular topic of conversation on the right bank in April, with many of his colleagues venturing the opinion that vines picked too early could fail to capitalize on the superb September weather and the great potential of this vintage. For his part, Moueix is quietly confident. "For our idea of Bordeaux, I think we picked right," he told me. "Originally we had planned to begin harvesting on the 20th but we ended up starting on the afternoon of the 7th at Petrus and then took our time with our other properties. I have a very precise idea of what a perfectly ripe berry is, and our fruit was ripe. If we had picked later, our wines would have been higher in alcohol, and we would have lost the feeling of freshness. People started to panic when they saw us picking." There are some good reasons why Moueix believed his fruit was perfectly ripe so early. "We booked 75 young people, mostly students, for the summer, as we usually do, but by the end of June, when they had all arrived, we didn't have much work for them to do. It was completely different in 2004: we used them for 21,000 hours in the vines. In 2005, because we needed to find work for them, we found manicuring work for them do: when you looked really closely at the fruit, there were still some berries to remove. We ended up using our team for 13,000 hours. And we were the only ones to reduce our crop at this level of specificity. We already had the feeling of having a great vintage as early as July. On August 6 and 7, I began eating berries for pleasure; this has never happened before. And by harvest time we didn't have a single berry that was underripe." Moueix describes 2005 as a merlot vintage (in 2003, the cabernet franc was better) and he compares the young 2005s to the '89s. He believes both will be classic long-aging vintages. The 2005s of the Moueix properties have what he described as "normal" alcohol levels in the 13.2% to 14% range.