Bordeaux 2024 En Primeur. 

After our annual cask-tasting visit to Bordeaux, we are still digesting our notes on the 2024 vintage.  Quality was very uneven, but through careful tasting, we still managed to find wines made to a very high standard. 

2024 was one of the most difficult vintages in recent times, due to a wet summer.  In the vintages of thirty and twenty years ago, weather like this would have shown through in the glass, producing dilute wines with unripe tannins and probably a distinct whiff of musty dampness.  This brings back memories for Antony of working a stage in Margaux in the 1994 vintage, and for Tim of visiting Bordeaux as an MW Student to taste the 2004 vintage and hearing about controversial winemaking trends like reverse osmosis, used to concentrate dilute wines.

In general, the 2024s show how far winemaking practices have come since then, so banish the wines of those days from your mind.  Even the poorer Cru Bourgeois and less successful Cru Classé were miles ahead of vintages like '94 in terms of quality (and it's worth remarking that '94 did produce wines that have aged well, like the bottle of Brane Cantenac which we opened recently!). 

Tasting the 2024s, we generally found attractive floral and fruit aromas, clean fruit flavours, and ripe tannins, with fresh, balancing acidity.  What was harder to find was the level of fruit concentration and, above all, the palate length and complexity that our customers should rightly expect of wines at the prices charged these days by top estates.  We had to make a very rigorous assessment, selecting a much smaller-than-usual range of wines that represent what we feel is the very best of 2024, wines that will live for a long time and that deserve a place in your cellar.  

The wait is now on to see what will happen regarding pricing.  Some Bordeaux merchants are hoping for a drastic return to price levels of a decade ago.  We expect to see the first releases next week!