Bordeaux En Primeur 2025: Special Weekly Report

Over just a little more than a week in Bordeaux, my team and I tasted nearly 400 barrel samples, visited 32 chateaux and met with dozens of winemakers and wine merchants. We think the 2025 vintage delivered some terrific red, white and sweet wines, and many are only going to get better as they are carefully aged in the cellars of the region’s best names. Maturation in barrel and other containers will refine what we tasted to an extremely high level of quality. Some of the best wines are at the same level as the great contemporary vintages of 2019 and 2016.

However, despite many Bordeaux vintners calling 2025 a great vintage, the year is inconsistent in quality on many levels. Some winemakers made poor decisions on picking times, grape selection and winemaking techniques, particularly extraction and maceration. Only the best vineyards, wineries and winemakers made great wines, and even some of them may have slightly missed the mark. Most small, unclassified vineyards had difficulty making the sacrifices needed to produce outstanding wines, according to winemakers who make larger regional blends.

“There’s lots of diversity in the vintage,” admitted Jean-Emmanuel Danjoy, the head winemaker for the Rothschild family’s estates, including Chateau d’Armailhac, Chateau Clerc Milon and Chateau Mouton Rothschild. The latter is one of my wines of the vintage, so far.

“The risk was to make a monster in 2025,” added Pierre Graffeuille, managing director of Chateau Montrose, which made another one of my top-scoring 2025s. “So we were very careful with the extraction and maceration. Montrose makes powerful wines, so the risk was too great. We tried to focus on finesse.”

What has been called by some Bordeaux wine producers a “modern vintage that is the kind today’s consumers want and can drink now” often made wines with lots of tannins, accentuated by higher acidity and moderate alcohol.

These wines will need careful handling in the cellar and time in bottle to reduce such high extract and phenolic structure. “I found the wines so tannic,” lamented a major importer from Moscow who was at the en primeur tastings last week with almost 3,000 other wine merchants from around the world.

It is hard to generalize about such a heterogeneous vintage as 2025. However, the two key elements in the red wines that define the vintage are lower alcohol levels than in recent top years, especially 2022, and higher acidity. Alcohol levels in the reds are mostly between 13 percent and 14 percent, about one degree lower than recent vintages. Moreover, the pH levels are about 3.6 to 3.7 on average, indicating relatively strong acidity for a hot year. That is a big difference from the hot and dry 2022, when pHs were as high as 3.9 to 4.

On paper, most people, including myself, expected the wines to reflect the hot and dry growing season during the summer, which some winemakers said was even more extreme than 2022. However, 2025 had more precipitation than 2022, and it was cooler at the end of the season and during the harvest. The first half of the year had rainy weather, creating a reserve of water for the hot and dry summer. Rain at the end of August also helped revive many red grapes during the growing season and reduced sugar levels, allowing winemakers to make wines with slightly lower alcohol. Others said they waited to pick later to achieve ripeness in their cabernets, even through the rains at the end of September.

“The whole thing about this vintage is the maturity of the tannins,” said Veronique Dausse, the head of Chateau Phelan Segur, who made a balanced and polished 2025. “And the rain on Aug. 29 really helped relaunch the vines, which were starting to show stress from the dry and hot weather. We picked the cabernet after Sept. 20, and this really helped us with the ripeness of the fruit and tannins.”

Further proof was that many winemakers and chateau owners commented on how green their vineyards remained until harvest, and some even showed photos. That was not what you would expect after one of the hottest and driest summers on record. The rain in August obviously helped revive their vineyards.

“I showed you the photo of the vineyard during the harvest, and it was green,” said Veronique Sanders, the manager of Chateau Haut-Bailly. “The photo was not Photoshopped. We didn’t have suffering from hydric stress, and we have old vines with deep roots. We also didn’t have any shriveled grapes. Harvest was easy – we didn’t need to sort much.”

White grapes for dry wines were picked in mid-August, one of the earliest harvests in the region’s history, and they made stunning, concentrated whites with brilliant acidity. “The whites are really powerful,” said Olivier Bernard, whose family owns Domaine de Chevalier, which made one of our favorite dry whites so far. “They are not heavy. They have great pH and fruit.”

Sweet wines were equally compelling and had excellent development of botrytis, giving a fantastic balance of ripeness, sweetness, spice and concentration. Lorenzo Pasquini, the technical director of Chateau d’Yquem, called the vintage “excellent” and added that it marked another top year for sweet wines, especially after the great trilogy of 2021, 2022 and 2023.

The higher acidity in all the wines can be attributed to the large diurnal shift between day and night temperatures, according to many Bordeaux winemakers. Some said temperatures could have been as high as 36 degrees Celsius (96.8 Fahrenheit) during the day before falling to 14 or 15 degrees in the early morning. Whatever the reason for the acidity and lower pH, this acid-fruit balance is evident in the wines. It gives them brilliance and energy when ripe fruit and tannins are behind them.

Conversely, red wines from grapes picked too early, mostly because producers were afraid of an onslaught of botrytis, may have had slightly unripe tannins, which are accentuated by lower pHs. This is what probably shocked many wine merchants last week during the en primeur tastings.

Some of the best wines in our tastings last week were those picked after the rain on Sept. 20, giving the wines, particularly cabernet, a little more ripeness after a few days and producing slightly plusher wines that were still fresh and vibrant. The fantastic 2025 Château Margaux is a sublime example of that intensity and ripeness, yet there is a gentle, seductive nature that is unique to this paradoxical vintage.

“We never had low pH in the last 10 years like this,” commented Philippe Bascaules, the managing director of Chateau Margaux. “So the problem was not freshness in 2025. The problem was the quality of the tannins and the capacity for the tannins to be integrated in the wine.”

Added Mouton’s Danjoy: “Because of the low pH and the moderate alcohol you have, this is a classic vintage. People are focusing on the low alcohol, but these are ageworthy wines. And there’s no need to worry about their tannins if the maturation of the wines in cellars is done properly. You will have wines that will have both ageability and drinkability.”

However, he warned that “if you make a very reductive elevage and less micro-oxidation, you could make wines that are difficult in the first few years. But if you do it properly, you won’t have that.”

For now, we need to wait and see. Even after rating nearly 400 wines, we still have another 200 or so to go. Some exciting young wines are emerging despite the ups and downs in quality.

I am not going to talk about prices at this point for en primeur – the historical process of selling a portion of a winery’s production while the wines are still in barrel. Every chateau, or wine domain, has its right price, or sweet spot, where consumers might be interested in tying up their money for two years in en primeur. But it is hard to know where that price is in such a crazy world, with two wars, a volatile global economy and the high cost of money.

It is tough out in the world at the moment. Maybe what we all need now is a glass or two of good Bordeaux already in bottle?

This is the first of two reports on 2025 Bordeaux from barrel. Stay tuned for the next report early next week.

– James Suckling, Editor & CEO

The list below is comprised of wines tasted and rated by the JamesSuckling.com tasting team. You can sort the wines below alphabetically or by winery name or score. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.