Bordeaux 2021 Vintage Report

Watch our Master of Wine Nicola Arcedeckne-Butler MW's chat with Edouard Moueix to discover more about the Bordeaux 2021 growing season, the market and what to drink from your cellar while your 2021s mature.
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Download our Vintage Report as a PDF here

After three very hot years, it was clear that climate change is here to stay and everyone in Bordeaux, from vineyard managers to winemakers, was embracing the new normal, working out how to mitigate the effects of heat and drought. And then along came 2021. After a dreary spring and early summer, followed by a cool, if slightly drier August, things didn’t look great, leading some commentators to write the vintage off even before tasting the wines. However, this is a vintage, more than any recent one, which demands to be tasted before making any sweeping statements.

Let’s start with the quality question

If we are totally honest, having read the weather reports from 2021 we were somewhat nervous of what we might find at our tastings. Would there be tart tannins, unripe wines and pale colours? We couldn’t have been more wrong! The most exciting wines in 2021 have vibrantly bright colours, more on the red spectrum than black or opaque as in recent vintages, with gorgeously lifted, fresh red fruit characteristics, plentiful ripe tannins and a lovely suppleness on the finish. For the most quality concerned growers, the usual triage process of a sorting table and perhaps an infra-red sorting machine was enhanced by up to three additional selection processes to ensure that only the truly ripe grapes would make it into the vats: triage in the vineyard, vibrating sorting tables in the winery, densiometric sorters analysing the sugar levels and finally the infra-red sorter – hugely labour-intensive, but resulting in brilliantly clean, fresh wines. Many winemakers reduced the time the wine remained on the skins post-fermentation as well as reducing any pumping over – ‘infusion’ rather than extraction was mentioned more times than we could count, and certainly the flavours were pervasive rather than invasive. Freshness is the byword in 2021 – our notes are peppered with the word, and Arnaud de la Forcade, Commercial Director of 1er Cru Classé Château Cheval Blanc in St Emilion summed it up when he said ‘I had forgotten what freshness looked like!’ – I think we all had.

2021 is, without doubt, the year when Cabernet excelled – both Sauvignon and Franc – and no single commune was more successful than another. Bigger appellations such as Margaux and St Emilion had greater variations than smaller ones like St Julien due to the sheer number of properties and differences in terroir, but there were winners and losers all round. The majority of the châteaux made significantly less grand vin in 2021 due to the weather and their rigorous lot selection, and the losses were more marked in properties dominated by Merlot and those practising organic viticulture. As ever, there are properties who buck the trend – Pomerol’s Château la Conseillante produced a fabulous wine from a near normal crop with an 85% majority of Merlot.

The weather facts

That the weather was contrary is not in any dispute but it was how the individual properties reacted to the challenges posed which defined the outcome of their wines. There are some basic facts which are, by and large, applicable to the entire region, although there are inevitably variations given the size of the area. There were two major frost episodes, firstly in early April, damaging principally the early-budding Merlot and white grapes, and particularly where there was damp in the area, and secondly just before the aptly named Saintes Glaces, the Ice Saints, in early May. Many deployed paraffin candles and wind turbines to disturb the air and protect from the morning sun with varied success; for those frosted in early April, the second frost put paid to the secondary buds and left them with little to play for.

After the frost, the weather was damp and cool throughout May and June, up to and beyond flowering, which was drawn out and only moderately successful; after the early budbreak, this essentially retarded the vines’ growth bringing the season back to more average timings. The problem now became disease pressure, specifically mildew, which broke out across all the vineyards and posed a particular challenge to the many growers who had begun the conversion to organic viticulture. Mildew spreads at an incredible pace once it gets into the vineyard and can only be stopped by spraying; for conventional growers, this means using a systemic treatment which is taken up by the vine and acts as protection against subsequent outbreaks, but for organic growers the treatments are topical, meaning that they need to be reapplied after each rainfall. The net result was that some growers sprayed up to 30 times to protect their nascent crop whilst others managed with just five treatments, prompting much soul-searching on whether, in this year, conventional viticulture was kinder to the environment, using less fuel and causing less soil compaction.

Many of the worst mildew outbreaks were, by chance, over weekends. For those living close to or actually in their vineyards, this meant enlisting family and colleagues to spray over the weekend and out of hours, but for properties who use contract staff (more than you might think) from specialist companies, the challenge was to carry out these vital treatments at short notice and, as a result, some applications were missed with disastrous results. Château Ausone even drafted in stonemasons working on their building to spray. In the Médoc, where the estates are considerably larger than on the Right Bank, the watchword was teamwork and several properties emphasised that without the vigilance and teamwork of their staff they would have ended up with significantly less healthy fruit come harvest time.

In mid-July the sun finally broke through, and the rain moved on. Whilst one or two days were above 30C, there were no heatwaves as in previous years and the vines had, of course, plenty of water to tap into after the damp spring. Bar a few useful showers in September, the weather remained essentially dry right through to the middle of October, allowing growers to pick as and when each plot reached full phenolic ripeness – key to the success stories in 2021. After the difficult early season, and with heavy rain predicted (which didn’t materialise), there were properties not prepared to take any more risks and they raced to pick before their Cabernets, in particular, were fully ripe. Some winemakers decided to chaptalise some or all of their tanks to add mouthfeel and an extra degree of alcohol, many considered it but decided against it; either way, there were very few wines where you could categorically state, from tasting alone, that they had been chaptalised.

For those who waited past the September showers, the fine weather remained until mid-October, and this long hang time, with sunny days and cool evenings, allowed the remaining fruit to ripen slowly and fully, retaining finer acidity levels than in the previous hotter vintages. For both Merlot and Cabernet, this was vital for complexity of flavour, and it particularly favoured the Cabernet Sauvignon in the Médoc and Cabernet Franc in St Emilion; as a result, many wines on both sides of the river have higher proportions of Cabernets in their blends, exacerbated by the frost damage to the Merlot.

The Market

No en primeur report can ignore the state of the market, and the potential reaction to the release of the wines. After three buoyant campaigns we would normally expect a slightly calmer market in the fourth, regardless of quality, however the sheer differentness of these wines, their freshness and immediacy, will make them obvious purchases for claret lovers. These are, on the whole, wines for the mid to long term, not the very long term, and they will drink beautifully before the 2019s and 2020s have resolved their tannins and come into a more elegant state. There is no doubt that there is a thirst for fine wines from all regions, particularly Bordeaux, and with the lower production we would anticipate demand for the smaller releases to be every bit as high as in the past three years, particularly on the top wines. As ever, we will only be offering wines which charm us for earlier drinking or show potential for the future, and there will be plenty to play with at all levels of price and quality. These are wines which will put a smile on your face as you drink them.

Nicola Arcedeckne-Butler MW
Director of Buying, Spring 2022

Download our Vintage Report as a PDF here