‘A Great Vintage for Great Terroir’: Bordeaux 2025 Looks for Its Sweet Spot

I always feel a sense of excitement each spring leaving Bordeaux after tasting more than 1,000 barrel samples of the latest vintage. This was especially so on Tuesday while flying back to Hong Kong following a two-week trip there with two of my editors and a videographer from my office. The 2025 vintage in Bordeaux made some exemplary wines with unique purity and tension that is hard to compare with recent vintages. The energy, moderate alcohol and fresh acidity are special for a young vintage at this time considering how ripe so many recent years have been because of extremely hot growing seasons. 2025 is different.

The best 2025 Bordeaux we rated are so outstanding that you almost want to drink them on the spot when you taste them, even though they are barrel samples. I haven’t come across many vintages like that in my 43 years tasting young unfinished wines from Bordeaux and I don’t remember any recent ones.

Granted, the vintage is not an across-the-board success, as I wrote in my first report last week. Many of the wines we rated showed slightly aggressive tannins or other flaws such as overextraction, too much wood or even dilution. The latter was the case with lesser-known wines from smaller appellations that obviously didn’t have the resources to make better wines. The financial crisis in Bordeaux is well documented, and it’s easy to see with your own eyes driving through the region, with empty fields where vines used to grow, abandoned vineyards left unpruned and rundown wineries.

Yet, my eight potential 100-pointers and 15 wines rated 98-99 tell the story for this vintage. Three of the 15 were dry whites, including the Domaine de Chevalier Pessac-Léognan Blanc 2025, Château Cos d’Estournel Bordeaux Blanc 2025 and Château Smith-Haut-Lafitte Pessac-Léognan Blanc 2025. Nine of the 23 wines that rated between 98 and 100 points were from St.-Émilion or Pomerol while five were from Pessac-Léognan and three from Pauillac. The big surprise for some is the near-perfect rating for the Château Les Carmes-Haut-Brion Pessac-Léognan 2025. The small vineyard in the city of Bordeaux works biodynamically in the vineyards and pushes the limits in refined winemaking with such techniques as whole-cluster fermentations.

This is a vintage that made wines that can be compared to the best ever in Bordeaux, yet they have their own unique character. They remind me of some of the great years of the past, but they have a singular character and exceptional quality due to recent weather patterns and contemporary high-quality viticulture and winemaking practices.

This is what the French call a great vintage for great terroir. The best vineyards of Bordeaux are adaptable to intense changes in climate, where they can retain moisture during dry and hot periods and drain excess humidity in wet spells. These vineyards or wineries also have the know-how and economic means to work in the best possible way in a year that takes a lot of agile decision making in viticulture and wine production.

“In a nutshell, it is a vintage with identity of the terroir,” said Penelope Godefroy, managing director of Maison Dourthe, which owns a half-dozen excellent estates in Bordeaux. “This was important. We made wines with identity. And the terroirs could adapt to the changing weather conditions.”

Baptiste Guinaudeau, one of the owners of the highly revered Chateau Lafleur, called it a hybrid vintage during a tasting of his 2025s. “It’s not possible for us to classify the 2025 vintage,” he said while tasting his 2025 Lafleur at his winery in Pomerol. “It was not classical solar [a sunny vintage] or cold. It is a multi-vintage when you have three or four weeks oceanic conditions and three weeks of continental climate. It’s cold and then hot.”

This was not the first time Bordeaux has seen a hybrid vintage, Guinaudeau added. 2016 was the first, followed by 2018, 2019 and 2020. “It’s the future,” for Bordeaux, he said. “We need to think ahead. … You have the phenolics [tannins] of a super-hot vintage while you are supporting the traditional flavors and liveliness of a classical year. Everybody is a little lost with this character. It is not working the usual way and gives proof of a new and contemporary vintage type.”

As I wrote last week, this hybrid character comes through clearly in the wines. There’s the attraction that comes from the slightly lower alcohol and higher acidity in so many of the wines, giving them tension and energy, although a number of the best wines in our tastings had normal alcohol and acid balances, particularly the best wines in Pomerol and St.-Emilion.

That means that on the limestone cotes (hillsides) and plateau just next to the famous village of St.-Emilion, as well as the legendary clay knoll of Pomerol made famous by Chateau Petrus, vineyards had normal growing conditions.

“We had great grapes with a juicy character on the plateau,” said consulting enologist Thomas Duclos, who consults for many top chateaus and champions precise viticulture and gentle winemaking. He was alluding to the best areas in St.-Emilion with limestone soils. “We seldom have problems with dryness or humidity. It always works. It is such great terroir. It was perfect for this vintage. Cabernet franc worked perfectly.”

Indeed, some of the very top wines in our tasting, all possible perfect wines, such as Ausone, Angelus and Chateau Les Carmes-Haut-Brion, showed incredible cabernet franc character with such purity of fruit, yet classic cabernet sauvignons such as Mouton Rothschild and Lafite Rothschild showed equally irresistible fruit intensity and balance. And pure merlots like Petrus and Le Pin were stupendous, as expected.

The grape-growing season was particular in nature. Some growers called it a paradox. 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 and 2023. However, 2025 had more precipitation than 2022, and it was cooler at the end of the season and during the harvest with a couple of key rainfalls. The first half of the year also had rainy weather, creating a reserve of water for the hot and dry summer. Rain at the end of August also helped revive many vines 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 during the rains at the end of September.

The looming question now is whether the wine trade and consumers are going to buy 2025 en primeur, or futures. I am just not sure that many people want to tie up their money in a young wine that won’t be delivered for another two years or so. But I might buy some 2025 myself. I love a number of the wines.

Pontet-Canet released its 2025 first, and it was below its 2024 prix de sortie, but the estate apparently gave more margin to wine merchants, which may explain why some offers to consumers came out slightly higher than 2024. This may reduce demand for 2025 en primeur, but prices may still be attractive.

Monday’s releases showed small increases across a number of tiers, which was a worrying sign for many in the wine trade. We spoke to more than 100 winemakers and owners during our time in Bordeaux, and few seemed inclined to keep prices at the same level as 2024. That is understandable considering the outstanding quality of many 2025 wines, but questionable given the weak wine market, the complexity of the global economy, two ongoing wars, the high cost of money and the amount of older Bordeaux and other excellent wines still available around the world.

My sources in the wine trade in Bordeaux said they had already sold some 2025 en primeur to wine merchants around the world. I personally received a number of offers from the United States and Hong Kong. Other Bordeaux wine trade members told me that they thought the offers were too early and that their clients around the world had to organize their offers of 2025 together and line up sales and marketing to their customers.

What the sweet spot for high-quality Bordeaux 2025 en primeur is remains hard to estimate. The market will decide, and each chateau needs to find numbers where trade and consumers are compelled to buy. It happened with the 2019 in 2020 during Covid. It could happen now.

“We can’t sell the 2025 at the price of 2024,” said Francois-Xavier Maroteaux, the owner of Branaire-Ducru. “Each chateau needs to decide. Some will be 0 percent, some 3 percent, 4 percent or 5 percent. Some could be 20 percent lower. We cannot sell at the price of the 2024. It is not an option. When a vintage is complicated, you drop the prices but we have an excellent vintage. We understand the market is not prepared to buy at a high price but we will have fair prices for all the wines.”

Added Edouard Moueix, of Etablissements Jean-Pierre Moueix in Libourne, a key negociant in Bordeaux as well as owners of such illustrious names as La Fleur-Petrus, Trotanoy and Belair-Monange: “We are selling wine. But you need the right prices. That’s all. People are drinking Bordeaux.”

– James Suckling, Editor & CEO

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