Bordeaux en primeur 2023 diary: day 3 – Right Bank brilliance

It’s easy when you’re criss-crossing the Left Bank of Bordeaux to lose sight of the sheer scale of the region as a whole, particularly when you pass almost instantaneously through Saint-Julien, Pauillac and into Saint-Estèphe in but a few minutes. A day spent on the Right Bank, therefore, feels almost like another region altogether, and reminds you that the sprawling estates that surround Saint-Emilion, Pomerol and beyond make up over half of Bordeaux’s wine-making capacity (if we include Entre-Deux-Mers).

For our third day of en primeur week we drove across the Pont d’Aquitaine and over to Château Angelus, now, like Cheval Blanc, ‘merely’ a Saint Emilion Grand Cru as opposed to the top tier ‘Grand Cru Classé ‘A’’ after they retired from the Saint-Emilion classification system last year, rather like a Michelin chef disdainfully handing back his three stars in the search for more creative freedom. The substantial proportion of Cabernet Franc in the blend made for an intoxicatingly floral nose and there was great structure and salinity on the finish (96-98+ points). Next we headed to Pavie (who had retained their ‘A’ classification) and their marble tasting room to taste a wine that I usually find slightly over-extracted and gargantuan, more in the old Robert Parker style than the modern, classical idiom, but I needn’t have worried when I instead found a wine with supple tannins, oodles of fresh fruit and huge structure delicately worn (‘This is a triumph’ 97-100 points).

After a trip to Canon La Gaffelière to try the impressive von Neipperg stable (93-95 for the Grand Vin) we made tracks to Pomerol and Château Nenin to try the Delon stable of thoroughbreds. Whilst Nenin (94-96 points), Potensac (92-94 points) and Clos du Marquis (94-96 points) were all impressive, Léoville Las Cases blew me away, with its sensuous nature and confident mineral core, certainly a wine to watch this campaign (‘Utterly superb’ 97-99 points). All four wines from across Bordeaux showed very well, exemplifying the success of the Delon ownership of the portfolio in recent years.

The impressive concrete vats at Château Beauregard

Our lunch stop was at Beauregard in their impressive winery, which also gave us the chance to try other wines from Pomerol at the UGCB tasting, with Clinet (95-97 points) impressing most. Cheval Blanc, with its Christian de Portzamparc designed chais which features on the front of Clos’ en primeur communications this year, is one of the most famous estates in Bordeaux and the wines were beguiling. Firstly, Quinault L’Enclos was brilliant for its average price, delivering unctuous fruit and freshness on the palate (92-94 points). Next was Cheval Blanc itself and, for me, one of the wines of the vintage (‘Utterly superb, with endless length’ 99-100 points). The property didn’t make a second wine this year, instead pooling all their resources into the Grand Vin and making 80,000 bottles of the stuff, which is a good thing as it will likely be in very high demand.

A stop at L’Evangile, owned by the Domaines Barons de Rothschild group, was excellent, with the positive evolution of the property year on year increasingly evident (‘this is a real gourmand’s wine’ 96-98+ points) and then it was on to Château Canon. I need to declare an interest here, or rather, a love, as Canon is always a wine that wears its winemaking on its sleeve, with fresh fruit, minerality and freshness at its core. At Clos Fine Wine, we also have a particular affinity for properties with a clos, or walled vineyard, which the majority of Canon’s plots are, high up on the Saint-Emilion plateau. With two days’ worth of accumulated tasting insight you start to look ahead and plot how certain properties might fare in a hotter year like 2022, and in the case of Canon its limestone terroirs was likely to be a huge asset. The wine is astonishing, battling with the likes of Montrose, Les Carmes Haut Brion and Cheval Blanc for wine of the vintage, with a stunningly beautiful perfume of rose petals, wild mint, blood orange and red berries. The palate is so well knitted, with cashmere-soft tannins and mouth-watering acidity on a profound finish (98-100 points). Berliquet, a property which Canon have managed for a few years now, continues its upward trajectory, making a delicious wine with opulent fruit and confident structure (94-96 points).

The Right Bank of Bordeaux impressed on day three, with those wines with a higher proportion of Cabernet Franc in the blend particularly successful. One of the triumphs of winemaking on the Right Bank in 2022 was maintaining opulence and fruit ripeness without sacrificing freshness, balance, and acidity in a hotter year. Whilst some smaller estates on better draining soils like sand perhaps lacked the requisite freshness, overall Saint-Emilion and the surrounding communes have pulled off an impressive achievement.

One of the stars of the vintage, Château Canon

As three days of intensive tasting come to an end, I am able take stock of the vintage and give an overview of its successes and limitations. Firstly, this is undoubtedly an excellent vintage, with some properties making their finest wines ever, but it would be churlish to suggest that it offers the sort of uniform excellence seen in truly outstanding vintages like 2016 or 2009. This heterogeneity makes it more important than ever to quiz your wine broker, as some wines you’ve been offered every year may not quite hit the same highs in 2022.

Whilst it is not quite a uniformly excellent vintage, given the extreme climactic events that occurred throughout 2022, vines, growers and winemakers have all excelled in acclimatising to years of extreme heat. The oldest and most experienced vines were able to both reach the deepest into the water deposits and to ration its use, ensuring optimum vine health. Growers had to be particularly mindful of canopy management and utilise other techniques to prevent the grapes from getting sunburnt, and from Pontet Canet’s biodynamic sun cream to Berliquet’s higher leaf canopies to provide more shade, most estates did sterling work in the vineyard. Finally, the teams in wineries across Bordeaux had to treat the juice with kid gloves, avoiding high fermentation temperatures and introducing cold soaking and other cooling techniques to ensure that the juice didn’t over extract colour and tannins from the grape skins and that acidity and freshness was maintained.

This triptych of vine, agronomic advance and winemaking technology ensured that 2022 will go down as a wonderful vintage with swathes of excellent wines which will in many cases give enormous drinking pleasure almost immediately and in the decades to come. Priced sensibly, and Lord knows that the en primeur system could do with attractive pricing given the rising interest rates, many of these wines with accompanying high scores could also end up as valuable assets, too, and so we will wait to see what release prices look like in the middle of May…