Bordeaux 2021: The Sound of Silence

There is an unfamiliar sound emanating from Bordeaux at the moment. It is the sound of – silence.

True, not all the vats have finished fermenting yet. Of those that have, few are through the malolactic fermentation. It is extremely early for any producer to have to give an opinion on the quality and nature of the vintage.

Nevertheless, in a very good year, there is always plenty of willingness to talk. Not this year. Most requests for comments went unanswered. Négociant Jean-Christophe Mau of Yvon Mau says the same. “Normally there are a lot of lunches for négociants at this time, but I have zero invitations this year. I think that before the end of March it will be impossible to taste this vintage.”

Now, I do not wish to attract accusations of writing off a vintage before it has even finished fermenting. It has been a challenging year, but there will be some very good wines, ripe and elegant. It is very heterogenous, however, and what is true for one château might not be true for its neighbors. Some properties had hardly any problems; others had one problem after another. Nature was neither fair nor even this year.

The second reason is that June was wet – “like November”, says Mau. That meant mildew for some. And July was cool and sunless and, says Mau, “in Bordeaux we need a nice July”.

August continued to be cool but the weather picked up in September and continued good into October, and while the grapes did finally reach maturity, it was a bit of a close-run thing. Some growers would have preferred to have waited a few days longer to pick, but it was too risky. “September was the most nerve-wracking part of the year,” says Jean-Charles Cazes of Lynch-Bages in Pauillac. “We had normal ripeness. But it was a thin line. We were happy to have all the grapes in.” That feeling of relief is palpable everywhere.

Lower yields helped, he says. “A very big crop, given the weather, would have been difficult to bring to full maturity.”

He had no frost damage, though. For Diana Berrouet at Petit Village in Pomerol – Pomeral largely escaped the frost, too – the key was keeping a cool head and waiting for ripeness and risk a bit of botrytis – “it was here from flowering; we knew we would have botrytis”, – but avoid green flavors. Stephan von Neipperg of Canon La Gaffelière in Saint-Émilion (and others) puts it more provocatively: “If you didn’t have botrytis this year, your grapes weren’t ripe.”

Flowering was good in some places, less good in others. Berrouet reports millerandage and coulure, especially in the Merlot. And after that, of course, there was mildew. “It was crazy,” she says. “We were always in the vineyard.” There were leaf-hopper attacks at some vineyards, too.

© FassadenGrün.de
| Mildew was a problem for many growers this year, along with botrytis.

Which brings us, as a tangent, to anti-mildew treatments. Coralie de Boüard of Angélus in Saint-Émilion is launching a new AI system called Sentinel, which you install in your vineyard and it measures humidity in the soil, in the air and in the vine. It also listens to the Météo, and – via an algorithm – warns of mildew attacks, she says, seven days in advance, thus enabling you to treat early and less. Various châteaux are interested in trialing it. At Rauzan-Ségla in Margaux they are testing ozone water, which involves adding the first to the second and is apparently a good disinfectant.

Acid tripping

The Boüard properties escaped mildew, says Boüard, and she reports “a nice volume, nice maturity, great balance. It’s a gourmet wine, full of acidity. We can’t have sunny vintages every year.”

Malic acid seems to be high at many properties. For Mau, who also runs Château Brown in Pessac-Léognan, there is 1.6 grams of malic in the Merlot compared to 1g last year and 3g in the Cabernet Sauvignon compared to 2g last year – and 4-5g in Petit Verdot. Neipperg, at Mondotte, which is mostly Merlot, had  2-2.5g malic, “but it’s going down fast; it’s 1.5g now”. Berrouet agrees. “Once the malo is finished, acidity and pH will be normal.”

Another tangent: having just tasted a range of 2019 Bordeaux and some 2020s, it seems to me that a bit more acidity in 2021 would be no bad thing. Some wines from those vintages are uncharacteristically soft, and really too low in acidity, even though they have nice freshness, lovely aromas and supple tannins.

If finding the right date to pick has been particularly ticklish this year, handling the grapes in the winery needs to be careful too, says Neipperg. “The ripeness of the seeds wasn’t so good; we need a gentle but long maceration.” Tannins are not very concentrated this year; it’s not a year for big extraction. Greenness and rusticity will need to be avoided. Alcohol levels are not that high either – often less than 13 percent – and will quite likely be chaptalized to bring them up a whisker. This year has seen the return of chaptalization. “The first year since 2013,” says Mau, for Brown. He is not alone.

It was not a non-interventionist vintage like 2019 and 2020, says Cazes. “It was a more technical harvest. But that’s part of the game. The end result is nice.” Berrouet points to a lot of technology, too: they did density sorting this year, and rejected between 10 and 20 percent depending on the parcel. “Because the veraison was so long we had ripe and unripe berries in the same bunch. We removed all the unripe ones, and the dry mildewed ones.”

Veraison was often complicated and slow because the vines continued to shoot at a time when they would normally stop. The plants were trying to do two things at the same time.

Comparative vintages, for the reds are, for Christian Seely of Pichon-Longueville, 2004, 2008 and 2014. Says Boüard: “Some are comparing it to 2010, but that is not my opinion. I think 2007 and 2014 – classical years. And 2006 as well.”

For the dry whites, though, Mau picks the excellent 2007 as a comparison. “They are lovely,” he says. “They have good freshness and acidity; the Sauvignon Blanc is superb.”

“Fantastic,” says Seely of the dry white from Suduiraut. “It’s the best so far. And we’re picking botrytized berries as we speak.”

Putting 2021 (so far untasted) into the context of the last few vintages, it looks as if Bordeaux styles have turned an important corner. Bordeaux is now so drinkable so young. This is not by accident, either. Bouard says: “We have to understand that the consumer is changing. People have no potential for storing wine at home. Cavistes say that customers come in and ask ‘what can I have with dinner tonight?’ It is a new consumer, and we have to adapt.

“Even if the wines have potential for aging, all the last years are accessible early: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 are accessible almost immediately, but that doesn’t mean they can’t age. If you have good balance,nice pH, nice alcohol, there is no problem of potential for aging.”

Whether most people will want to age them is another matter. If you do’’t have to, why would you? But that’s another subject.