Bordeaux 2010 review: Repeat performance

After all the hype of the 2009 vintage, 2010 has been greeted with more of the same – but who will buy it? Margaret Rand reports.

The art of reassessment is one at which the Bordelais are particularly expert. Last year 2009 was the greatest vintage in the history of the universe; but this year, for the magic circle of châteaux which comprise the core of the en primeur campaign, those wines are sold.

So when Paul Pontallier of Château Margaux, rocking slightly on his heels, says that to begin with he was really embarrassed at the prospect of telling people that 2010 is as good but different, you know that across the region you can expect plenty of reassessment.

Last year, Pontallier told us that the 2009s would outlive us all; this year the 2009s are widely billed as more forward, more easy than the 2010s, which will therefore outlive not just us but the 2009s as well. My old friend and colleague Hugo Dunn-Meynell says he’s too old to buy green bananas; one begins to feel the same way about claret.

Because this is a very tannic vintage. Charles Chevalier of Lafite defines 2009 as an opulent year with vivacity, and 2010 as a classic year with opulence. More gentle extraction was key: a cooler start to the fermentation, less pumping over and a carefully monitored but longer maceration period, “judging it little by little”, according to Philippe Dhallouin of Mouton Rothschild, was vital for balance. It’s a vintage that favoured Cabernet Sauvignon over the higher sugars of Merlot, the Left Bank over the Right Bank, and producers who habitually practise restraint over those who go all out for power.

The JP Moueix wines are glorious this year; so is Vieux Château Certan; so is Ausone. Some St-Emilions, by contrast, are reminiscent of Amarone.

However uneven the quality of the vintage (and it is more uneven than 2009), buyers were out in force at the primeurs. They came from 68 countries, says Sylvie Cazes of Pichon-Lalande – and they included visitors from such markets as eastern Europe, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia. It’s unlikely that all will buy en primeur, but the expectation is that the US will re-enter the market this year if only because the last vintage they bought much of was 2005.

Says Jean-Guillaume Prats of Cos d’Estournel: “There’s a demand for brands.” Not least for Cos-branded silk scarves, of which they ran out during the primeurs. (Interestingly, he numbers 2003 among Bordeaux’s “great” vintages. More reassessment, or just a realistic reading of US taste?)

What of Asia? The visitors were there – from Hong Kong, mainland China, Macau, everywhere except, as far as I could see, Japan. “Japan is lost,” says Corinne Mentzelopoulos of Château Margaux. The Chinese will probably still not buy en primeur, but one way or another, the wine will reach them. The châteaux reckon that at least 60%, and probably 80%, of their wine ends up in Asia. “There’s probably another two or three years of a rising Chinese market,” says Hew Blair of J&B. “Then we’ll see.”

Britain is no longer routinely described as a market; it’s a hub. For budget-conscious Brits, prices are going to be a problem this year. Says Richard Berkley-Matthews of Clarion: “The £75-300 per case customers are increasingly disenfranchised. Oxbridge colleges can’t afford these wines, and they don’t want to be seen to be buying them at the moment. Even smart colleges are still trying to buy at under £200 a case in bond.

"The Rhône is the net beneficiary. You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find that in Bordeaux now.”

For those Brits who do buy top wines, another €50 or more per bottle is presumably neither here nor there. If you can afford to pay that much, what difference does a bit more make? The châteaux know this perfectly well.

One merchant said to me before primeurs week: “In every conversation I have with château owners, they ask me if I can sell at the same price as last year, or more.” And even if the early demand from consumers seems, so far, to be more muted than last year – says Blair: “There aren’t the people ringing up saying: ‘I want all the Latour’ that we had last year” – that may well change once Parker’s notes come out. As Jean-Christophe Mau of Yvon Mau points out: “Parker matters to China. If a wine isn’t famous, but has high Parker points, they’ll buy it anyway.”

The link between the price of the first growths and the seconds, even the super-seconds, looks increasingly tenuous this year. Says Pontallier: “There is a certain level of price which can only be reached by the first growths. Today the firsts are a very special segment of the market.” So will they sit on their hands again this year before releasing their prices? Will they be watching how the market reacts to the super-seconds? “Should we, as in the past, lead the way,” he says, “it would give a wrong message to the others, and they could be tempted to increase their prices too much. That could be disaster for them.

“Their success or not doesn’t tell us as much as it did in the past. We pay attention to how the market reacts to their pricing, but we are now in a slightly different market, and there are no fundamental lessons to draw either from their success, or the opposite.”
Says Thomas Duroux of Palmer: “The firsts and seconds were linked in 2008, but in 2009 the firsts were impossible to follow. But we look at the firsts, and we release after them as a matter of policy.”

Is there anything that might not go up? Market forces will count. Mau talks of Sociando-Mallet, which last year “put 75% of its wine in a week, at the same price as the 2005”; in 2005, by contrast, it sold everything within one hour. Ducru Beaucaillou, it is said, might find it difficult to raise prices; Lagrange and Léoville Las Cases likewise. But Beychevelle and Haut-Bailly, it is said, will have no problem in raising theirs.

In the end the point is, as Berkley-Matthews says: “The market has gone crazy in the last eight months, and the back vintages, the 2007s and 2008s, have gone.” The demand is there. What would you do, if you were a château-owner?  

Margart Rand, from the May 2011 edition of the drinks business