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As Bordeaux launches its latest vintage, what can we look out for that won’t cost a small fortune?
Château de Pitray, Côtes de Castillon, Bordeaux, France 2017 (£13.99, or £9.99 as part of a mixed case of six, majestic.co.uk) One of the explanations for Bordeaux’s leadership of the fine wine world is the carefully managed hoopla that surrounds the launch of the region’s new vintage each spring. In normal times, the world’s fine wine trade and journalists would flock to Bordeaux in their hundreds in April, flitting from château to château to pass judgment on an endless succession of samples of young, still-maturing wines drawn straight from the barrel. Then, as spring moves into summer, the châteaux use those verdicts to decide just how much they can charge when they sell a proportion of their stock “en primeur”: wines that won’t be delivered to their buyers for another couple of years. The whole thing usually keeps Bordeaux at the top of the wine news cycle for months. With France in lockdown for the past two springs, however, the Bordelais have had to think of different ways to spread the word about whether, for example, a wine such as Château de Pitray is as classically stylish as it was in 2017.
Château Cambon La Pelouse, Haut Médoc, Bordeaux, France 2015 (from £23, davywine.co.uk; leasandeman.co.uk) Most of the en primeur hype is reserved for the members of the exclusive club of crus classés (literally classed growths) that occupy the top tier of Bordeaux. This club has been set in stone for getting on for 170 years, with the 59 top châteaux of the Médoc (plus one from Graves) in the Left Bank region south of the Garonne River being fixed in divisions from Premier Cru (the top five estates including Latour and Lafite) to Cinquième Cru (the bottom 18) since the ranking was drawn up for the Exposition Universelle de Paris in 1855. It’s hard, especially in good vintages (such as 2020 seems, on my limited tasting, to be), to find value in that Top 60. But there are excellent wines to be found in the next level down, with the best Cru Bourgeois, such as Cambon La Pelouse’s 2015, offering classically elegant yet deep red wines that will age and improve for many years. Continue reading...