Bordeaux En Primeur 2024 Tasting Report: Shimmers of Light in a ‘Nightmare’ Vintage

The day after Chateau Lafite Rothschild released its 2024 en primeur on the market on April 29, offers were coming in from all over the world to my email. One caught my eye. It was from a Hong Kong merchant selling the wine, which is still aging in barrel, for 336 euros. That’s essentially selling the wine just a few euros above cost.

“That’s aggressive pricing,” a Bordeaux negociant said by email after I sent him a copy.

Whatever the amount, the 2024 Lafite was about one-third less than the release price for the chateau’s excellent 2023 en primeur and half the price of the heralded 2022, which was released in mid-2023. The price drop clearly reflects the overall quality of the vintage, which produced a few superb wines, even unicorns, but in general was a weak and challenging year at best. The difficulty in grape growing in 2024 came from the very wet weather and intense bouts with mildew, as well as more rain and botrytis during the harvest. Some winemakers called it a “nightmare” vintage. But Lafite sold because the price hit a sweet spot in the market, and it’s also the cheapest Lafite in a decade.

“The price was necessary to send a good message to the market and our neighbors,” said Olivier Tregoat, the technical director of Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite). “We know that it is not an exceptional vintage, and the idea was to set everything at the right price and to try to get dynamism in the market for the next months. All the negociants bought all the wines. And all their clients bought the wine. We are confident on the feedback.”

After tasting more than 700 barrel samples over the last two weeks of April with Senior Editor Zeun Shuai, I believe that the 2024 vintage for Bordeaux will be remembered more for its price than its quality – assuming more chateaux follow Lafite’s example of reasonable and thoughtful pricing. So far, some of the other revered estates who have followed suit with similar decreases include Angelus, Cheval Blanc, Montrose and Smith Haut Lafitte.

Regardless of price, nearly all the top wines from our tastings are medium-bodied with fine tannins and a crunchy, bright character. They clearly lack the ripeness of recent vintages from 2015 to 2023, giving them a linear and fresh nature. Most are about 13 to 13.5 percent alcohol with pHs of around 3.6 to 3.75, meaning they have vivid acidity.

“It’s so hard to have a vintage like this when you spend the most ever to harvest good grapes and make good wine and then you drop prices,” said Henrique da Costa of Chateau Pavie. “It is always like this.”

READ MORE BORDEAUX 2022 VINTAGE REPORT: FRESH SPIN ON A HOT YEAR

With the exception of a few unicorn wines of the vintage, such as Latour and Lafleur, these are not wines that are comparable to those from the top years of recent decades, especially the full-throttle vintages such as 2022, 2020, 2018, 2015, 2010 or 2009. In years like those, reds have alcohol pushing 15 percent and relatively low acidity. They need at least eight to 10 years of bottle age to approach drinkability. By comparison, the best of 2024 will be drinkable a few years after release.

For me, it was something nostalgic to taste the 2024s from barrel. They remind me of modern renditions of years such as 1985 and 1995 (two vintages I tasted from barrel), as well as more recent years such as 2021 and 2014. These ’24s are like what the English used to call “clarets,” even “luncheon reds” – lighter Bordeaux that are easy to drink young. Zekun appreciated them as well, saying that many young consumers (he’s in his early 30s) would be attracted to these wines, especially if they sell for reasonable prices. Asian wine lovers are also less focused on buying only the best vintages, unlike in the United States.

In any case, the best 2024s certainly will give pleasure when young yet hold on for years to come in a lighter and more refined way. Dry whites are of very good to excellent quality. In fact, two of our top wines of 2024 are the dry whites of first growths: the Château Haut-Brion Pessac-Léognan Blanc and Pavillon Blanc du Château Margaux Bordeaux Blanc.

Sweet whites appear to have potential as well. “Sauternes was not a problem in 2024,” said winemaker Vincent Cruege of Lafaurie-Peyraguey. “We could wait, and we had very even rotten berries. The best grapes were harvested the second week of October. Some people may have harvested too early.”

Please keep in mind that we didn’t taste many wines from small, lesser-known producers or minor appellations because we tried to focus on names who traditionally sell en primeur. I tasted a few reds from lesser-ranked estates, and most were diluted and dull. We will do the due diligence and taste more wines in bottle in January 2027.

It’s very difficult to generalize about 2024. It is one of the most heterogeneous vintages I have encountered in my 42 years of tasting barrels in Bordeaux. The majority of the producers who made excellent wines had early-ripening vineyards, or “grand terroir,” as the French say. They also had large and efficient teams to do all the work in the vineyards during the growing season and harvest, and those teams were managed efficiently and precisely in their timing for disease treatments, viticulture processes and harvesting. It all costs a lot of time and money, which most in the Bordeaux world of wine do not have. The fact that many vineyards in outlying areas of the region are being pulled out highlights the financial demise of simple Bordeaux wines.

The major challenge that everyone who grows vines and makes wine shared in 2024 was the rain. They all had to deal with the wet weather, although statistics I viewed from a top winery showed that Pessac-Leognan had the most rain and St.-Estephe the least in August and September – the two crucial months for growing grapes in Europe.

The rain during 2024 was about two-thirds more than an average year in Bordeaux. It rained about 1,500 millimeters in total, while the average over the past 10 years was about 900 millimeters. The saving grace was that July and August were relatively dry, although temperatures were cool and sunlight slightly diffused. This made ripening difficult, but it was just enough for many to harvest grapes with about 13 to 13.5 percent alcohol.

The best grape growers scrambled to increase sun exposure through leaf plucking, which also helped their fight against mildew by improving airflow and access to the grape bunches for spraying against disease. Some growers were forced to spray products against mildew in their vineyards more than 30 times, especially those farming organically. This is double what they normally do in a good season, highlighting the difficulty of growing grapes. Some organic growers decided to return to traditional farming methods and used systemic fungicides.

I still remember being in Bordeaux in late March 2024 and being surprised that so many of the top wineries I visited in Pomerol, such as L’Evangile, had already done one or two treatments because mildew spores had already been discovered. Not that long ago, mildew spraying usually began in May, but the continued disease pressure in the vineyards throughout Europe due to new weather patterns has changed that.

“It was a small victory for us that we treated against mildew so well,” admitted L’Evangile’s winemaker, Juliette Couderc. “We are organic, and we only lost five percent in production from that mildew.”

Botrytis, or gray rot, may have been even more of a hindrance to making top-quality wines in 2024, and the disease hit growers hard during heavy, intermittent rains that began after Sept. 20. Winemakers said that many of their workers, mostly in their 20s, had never seen rot like this in vineyards and panicked. One winemaker told me he called his father, who has made wines from the late 1960s until now, and asked him about the rain and rot in the middle of the harvest. His father calmly said to relax and wait for the grapes to ripen to a good level, even under the rain.

“Many people didn’t have the experience,” said Cheval Blanc’s Nicolas Corporandy, who is the technical director of viticulture. “During the last years, people were used to over-ripeness of grapes and not with rain and botrytis. And some of them really panicked. It was like pre-2000 harvests. It was really a question of understanding rain and rot and when to pick. You had to be willing to lose something but pick later to get some ripeness in your grapes.”

Winemakers needed herculean efforts to extract the best grapes from what was available in their vineyards. Selection was at every level. The chateaux and domaines with the best resources used just about every method possible, from cutting away poor-quality grapes on the vines to using various sorting machines, including hand sorters, density-based sorting system, and optical sorting machines. A number of the top wineries said they used all of these sorting methods to extract the best grapes to ferment.

“Those who managed this sorting perfectly made something beautiful in 2024,” said Pierre Courdurie, the owner of the tiny Croix de Labrie in St.-Emilion. “Everything had to be in detail. First you needed to have great terroir and then you needed to do everything perfectly and at the right time.”

Added Gonzague de Lambert, the estate manager St.-Emilion’s Chateau de Ferrand: “The big difference today from the 1980s and 1990s is all the work to make a good wine in a year like 2024, with so much rain, is that the work is done in the vineyard, while years before it was done in the winery.”

In most cases, grape yields were reasonable, with most of the best producers reporting between 25 and 40 hectoliters per hectare. Yet some had isolated instances of bad berry set during the flowering in May, particularly in merlot. Chateau Latour was one of the smallest productions we encountered, with only 11 hectoliters per hectare of wine. The Latour 2024 was one of the best wines of our tasting, however, even though it’s not sold en primeur.

“It is the lowest yield at Latour since 1961,” said Frederic Engerer, the head of Chateau Latour. “I am not saying the quality is comparable. But it is a very low yield. This was mostly due to coulure [floral abortions] and not mildew. We had such low yields, and we still had to sort. It really hurt.”

What was left for most of the top winemakers was carefully fermented. Most of the dozens of high-quality winemakers said they were very soft and reserved in their winemaking. Fermentations were at low temperatures and extractions kept to a minimum. A few admitted chaptalizing to increase the mid-palates in their wines, and a few said they bled vats before fermentation or reduced the juice with the skins in the vats. They were worried about the quality of the tannins in the must and did not want to accentuate them through these techniques.

It was surprising to hear that many used cold soaks (the juice and skins macerating together) before fermentation to stabilize color and give character. However, this highlighted the good quality of their grapes, considering the difficulty of the harvest. They also spoke often about the quality of their press wines, which suggests the quality of the final grapes in their cellars was better than expected.

Thoughts about aging the 2024s in wineries were varied. Most winemakers said they wanted to preserve the fruit in the wines and seemed hesitant to use too much new wood or move the wines too much, which could dull the fruit or slightly oxidize their fragile new wines. A few said they would give air to their wines with regular racking, which “will increase their mid-palates.”

Everyone agreed that the 14 to 18 months of maturation in whatever container they used – from traditional 225-liter barrels and large casks to ceramic amphorae and glass Wineglobes – would improve the wines. We will wait and see the results. It will be interesting to understand the differences when we taste the wines in bottle in early 2027. We will be ready to taste them, as always.

For now, the market will decide what it thinks about 2024 as en primeur. Prices are coming down, and the quality is very good for the top wines considering how difficult the grape-growing season was. But the global economy is in a fragile state with the dollar losing ground against most major currencies, volatile stock markets and a loss of consumer confidence. The 2024 vintage will be remembered for many things, but wine may be the least important of our memories.

– James Suckling, CEO & Publisher

Note: The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated by James Suckling and the other tasters at JamesSuckling.com. You can sort the wines below by score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.