LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT BORDEAUX 2013: RHUBARB IS THE NAME OF THE GAME…
In my home country of Denmark, we are very fond of Rhubarb; this mysterious and highly acidic stalky plant with large canopies for leaves. It is nearly impossible to eat Rhubarb raw and believe me, growing up in Denmark, you almost have to try it, before realizing that it is impossibly sour with high acidity, mainly from oxalic acid, but also possesses a very short tart taste that makes your mouth pucker up as if you had just bitten into a cookie made from alum. Alum is most often used in pickling recipes as a preservative to maintain fruit and vegetable crispness. The best use for Rhubarb is to make compote or pie, both of which can be delicious after boiling the stalks with water and sugar to reduce it and you’re left with a quite tasty treat. At least if you’re from Scandinavia or England. From Wikipedia we can learn that “Rhubarb also contains glycosides—especially rhein, glucorhein, and emodin, which impart cathartic and laxative properties. It is hence useful as a cathartic in case of constipation.”
While you may wonder why I just spent an entire paragraph on a dissertation about Rhubarb, I was in fact describing roughly 99.5% of all the Red wines made in Bordeaux in the 2013 vintage. Now before you start killing the messenger, remember that still leaves dozens of wines, or at least a few decent ones. Such is the malaise which has afflicted this vintage and only through the most meticulous of efforts, were some wines left that are light in style, resplendent with red fruits and berries and have some measure of fine tannins, soft acidity and nice balance; even some decent length. And I am mainly talking about the 15-20 wines in total that can be deemed the great successes of this feeble vintage. These are not wines which are going to be compared to the highs of 2009-2010, not the round, delicious and utterly drinkable 2008’s either. How about 2004 and 2007 then? Nope! Come on now, then it’s gotta be close to the 1997’s; nope…The best I can think of after having tasted Bordeaux young and out of barrel for the past 26 years in a row, is the modern-day version of a hypothetical blend of 1992, 1993 and 2011; all among the greatest of vintages in Bordeaux’s illustrious modern history no doubt…but NOT!
But I digress. The idea of naming an entire vintage something other than what it is in and of itself is utter nonsense, but something that nevertheless has become de rigeur among the established wine critics and press. While I am counting myself in that category, I must also confess that my earlier proposed theory about cycles - which in and of themselves are nothing new - seems to be coming true. I proposed in an earlier post on this BB that we’re in the middle of a very interesting 20-year cycle that seems to afflict the Bordeaux region exactly every 20 years, as it has for the past couple of generations. We need only look to 1971-72-73-74 and 1991-92-93-94 to find that 2011-12-13 and surely soon 2014 were and are bullshit lows in an otherwise string of highs…that is if you naturally discount the years ending in 7 (which for the past 70 years have sucked huge). It is with certainty that 2015 will become the next Vintage of the Century and prices will be making us think back to the ridiculously cheap 2009’s and 2010’s…haha how could we have been so foolish to not have taken our “allocations” of the shitty 2013’s and stocked up on the low-brow 2014’s, in order to secure highly sought-after allocations for the splendid once-in-a-lifetime 2015’s…see where I am going with this…
History merely repeats itself in some hallucinatory cycle of Groundhog Day meets Johnny Mnemonic. I could have been reading “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by the great S. Hunter Thompson while tasting the 2013’s in general, before believing that anyone in their right mind could come up with just one compelling reason to sink any amount of money into any of the wines of this vintage, as there simply is no basis whatsoever, not in reality, not in fantasy, to do so… OK, so the clear wines of the vintage are: Lafleur and VCC for Pomerol; Ausone and Larcis-Ducasse for Saint Emilion; Montrose and Mouton (whose entire line-up was unusually strong for the vintage in general) for the entire Left Bank and then all the Whites of Graves/Pessac-Leognan (not the greatest white wines of all time, but very nice and crisp; just the way they’re supposed to be) and least but not last Chateau Yquem who has the greatest wine since 2001 with their 2013 wine. That’s it folks!
A few years ago, the big news that was presented to the press, was the magical Optical Sorting Table. When employing this cunning and quite amazing device with the 2013 harvest, it sorted away roughly 98% of the freshly picked berries, as reported by the vast majority of the top properties who tried to use it last year. This naturally resulted in them realizing that the Optical Sorting Table only works with great vintages, as the optical “eyes” look for perfection in the berries. And yes, you guessed it; the Optical Sorting Tables, easily costing in the hundreds of thousands of Euros were completely useless for the 2013 harvest. They were unplugged and the properties were right back to the good old-fashioned hand sorting berry by berry, although some reported doing it on the vines themselves before allowing the pickers to cut the bunches. Imagine after the Coulure, Millerandage and Rot, plus whatever else Mother Nature took revenge upon the Vignerons with, they still had to go through this intense sorting experience, leaving not much really to make wine out of. Yields are dramatically low, telling horror tales of de-selections and downright dropping of entire vineyard plots, before making hard decisions on whether to proceed at all. Many did regrettably, some did not; most notably Le Pin and Hosanna from Pomerol, which overall seems to again be the most successful region overall, but not like in 2012 where it kicked everybody else’s ass completely, in an otherwise also-ran, mediocre vintage.
The 2013’s are in general very light in color (all on the red spectrum trending towards pinkish); they are quite light in alcohol with most coming in at 12.5-15% alcohol by volume, which is unusually low nowadays. Many have this very bright red fruit streak with red currants, cranberry juice, rhubarb (in various forms but not all wines) and then tannins which range from rather coarse to less coarse, but rarely fine and elegant as we saw with the 2008’s or 2012’s for Pomerol (which was the most successful appellation in that otherwise pretty average vintage too). Most lack any notion of a finish and there’s little to no extraction, since it was impossible to extract from thin-skin berries and get any sort of result out of it. Don’t forget that we’re quite used to seeing fairly forward extracted fruit from such regions as Napa especially but also Spain, Australia and Argentina, where all that is possible because the fruit is way riper. There were near-tropical levels of humidity (think Singapore in the Spring) before harvest time, which cause wide-spread rot in the vineyards, something which was very detrimental to the final yield and the resulting wines. It did wonders for the unsellable Sauternes wines, which again ended up making great wines in a vintage ending with an odd number. They can’t seem to make any good wines in vintages ending with even numbers, but then again, the market actually doesn’t care, except for Chateau Yquem, which as I mentioned, is near legendary in scope for the 2013 vintage.
There are a total of about 18 or so wines that passed the test for the entire vintage, after tasting roughly 1,200 wines (some multiple times). Greatest value wine of the vintage is Chateau D’Aiguilhe from Stephan von Neipperg, as it is typically expected to be released at just under 10 Euro, but it rocked all 4 times it was tasted, both in Paris and Bordeaux. Greatest Grand Cru Classes predicted value wines of the vintage are Chateau D’Armailhac and Chateau Clerc Milon, both from the Mouton “stable” and made under the able hands of master winemaker Philippe Dhalluin. As I said, the strongest portfolio at the tastings in all of the Medoc was clearly the one at Mouton, where all the wines showed tremendously well for the vintage. Many will say what about this wine or that wine, but it doesn’t really matter anyway, because you’re not going to be buying them anyway…having tasted well over 800 wines, with many several times as usual, but not entirely finished yet for the week, I would be very surprised to find something revolutionary coming out among the remaining ones…I think I have this vintage nailed down pretty well.
The entire notion of a “campaign”, like some great Napoleonic expedition to Egypt is but a moot point entirely. Stay at home, save your hard-earned cash and just wait for the wines to eventually trickle into the marketplace at either the exact same price they opened at or heavily discounted well below. My money is on the later, again because history repeats itself and this is not a vintage where anyone will need to “invest” in anything; not time, not effort and certainly not money. For all those who live in Europe, come 2015, these wines will be lining the shelves at the great “Foire au Vins” at a Carrefour or Auchan near you and then they’ll be seriously cheap. Almost all vignerons/Chateau Owners/whathaveyou agree that had it not been for modern-day techniques, the ability to heavily select fruit and pick at the right time, this entire vintage would have been 1984, 1977 or 1972 all over again and they were largely undrinkable. The 2013’s are not undrinkable at all; they’re just very light and short in general with few highlights sprinkled in between.
Needless to say,
there are NO 100-point wines at all in the 2013 vintage; there also are no 95 point wines in the 2013 vintage and that’s just the god-honest truth. A truth that I may be “scolded” for telling, perhaps even uninvited from a few parties for, but one that I have always offered right after tasting a new vintage “from barrel” and one that I firmly stand by. C’est La Vie as the French say for good reason…