I travelled to Bordeaux in April 2007 with a colleague with whom I played rugby many years ago and I was happy to have him with me. With broad shoulders, sound scrummage technique and a little dash of front row skulduggery we unearthed the gems. It was tough going in parts and by no means the delirious glide from approachable stylish wine to approachable stylish wine that I experienced with the 2005s. There are wines that will provide some excellent future drinking. There are some very worthy contenders for future cellar plans. To conclude the rugby analogies however this was forwards’ work. The 2006s are for the long term. They are effective and concise and every bit as worthy of the points but at this young stage in their development there are few that show any silky-hand techniques of the backs.
“Classic Bordeaux” was a comment that I kept on hearing “Traditional Bordeaux” was another. Bordeaux wines are examples of the blender’s art. At the Cru Classé level they are not for early drinking. These are wines that need to come together in the barrel and the bottle.
The en primeur tasting week revealed wines that had achieved wonderful poise and no little finesse. They were constructed from ripe fruit and were beautifully balanced. Against these, there were others that were overextracted and some with too much tannin. Some lacked a proper fruit core; some, whilst solidly made, lacked any refreshing acidity to balance the obvious superstructure. So it was a vintage of variation. There are some excellent wines – a tiny few that were better than their respective 2005s – and there are some failures.
The weather played a significant role in 2006. Things could not have been going any better until August. But, even then, the perfect conditions only gave way to less advantageous weather as opposed to particularly bad conditions. It is interesting to repeat the comments of Lilian Barton Sartorius who said, “A lot has been said about ‘excessive rain’ but this is a misleading exaggeration … we were able to start picking on 20th September in excellent conditions which lasted until the end of our harvest on 30th September. Some heavy rain fell during the first week of October, so we were fortunate to have finished our harvest before the rain. The trend recently has been to pick as late as possible but while we certainly agree that ripe fruit produces the best wine, we feel that waiting too long can result in grapes that have lost their vitality.”
What the poorer weather at the end of the season did mean was that there was a need for a reasonably harsh selection on the sorting tables and further painstaking decisions in the cellar as to which parcels to include in the grand vin. Tasting at Ausone with Alain Vauthier the talk centred on the reduced yields and how the allocations all along the supply line were obviously going to be down. The châteaux that signed up for rigorous selection processes delivered exceptional wines. Those that favoured quantity or who delayed their harvest until too late have produced tough and uninspiring wines.
So are there any obvious guidelines to tell you about for the 2006s? The variation continues with the reviews. Rarely have I seen such disparate opinions. Margaux was described by one MW as “the most troubled” AOC and by another as “one of the highlights”. There does seem general agreement however that the northern Médoc achieved good structure, Pomerol did well and that amongst both the reds and the whites of the Graves there were some gems.
This leaves us with just prices to discuss. The campaign has a general trend of 10 to 15% down vs. the 2005s. Before travelling to Bordeaux I was expecting a more significant drop. There are some chateaux are 20 to 30% down and these seem to me to be well priced. That said 2006 is definitely a superior vintage to 2004 and a much reduced vintage in terms of quantity. Most importantly however I am afraid that the rules have changed. Bad vintages are likely to become rarer as technology enhances both grape growing and wine making. The 2005 vintage is seen in Bordeaux as a new benchmark and not as a maximum. Top Bordeaux is a prized possession and there is a widening market for these wines. A top tier of the most popular wines have sold out quickly and thereby provided the ultimate justification for their opening prices.
