“Remarkable, miraculous, and truly exceptional vintage.”
Not my words, nor those of a Bordeaux château owner, typically bigging up their property’s new wine. No, the very erudite Colin Hay, a man who, when he is not writing about fermented grape juice, works as the Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po in Paris. He is not given to hyperbole, and he remains firmly grounded when assessing En Primeur claret. Furthermore, he is not flogging his own dotcom blog, so he can be, and is, completely objective. He goes even further, “I am utterly convinced that this is the very best vintage that I have had the privilege and honour to taste en primeur.” So, is he right? Well, he just might be onto something…
As always, there were murmurings of great quality when the harvest landed in the cuveries last September, but the wine trade’s pinching of salt has now become very much “de rigueur.” However, when Damien Sartorius of Léoville Barton told me that he could not believe how well his wines had turned out (again, a man for whom understatement is the norm), one began to sit up, and take notice.
That salt-pinching, of course, was always going to happen when 2022 delivered such record-breaking temperatures, allied to exceptional drought. How were the vines going to cope, and how were they going to produce their finest fruit? One recalled 2003, another year of “la canicule,” when grapes were often sunburnt, and there was a constant struggle for water. Some estates scored superbly, others not so much, but every vigneron noted that it had been incredibly hard to know what to do in the vineyard. The heat was unprecedented. It was a whole new ball-game.
