Bordeaux En Primeur 2022: ‘Astonishing’ Vintage Sets New Benchmark

This is the 40^th year I have tasted barrel samples in Bordeaux, but I have never come across anything like the 2022 vintage. It was one of the hottest and driest growing seasons in the history of France’s most famous wine region, yet it produced thousands of opulent and structured but still fresh and balanced wines.

For me personally, it sets a new benchmark for Bordeaux after my first reference vintage for the region from barrel, 1982. The 2022 shows that the vineyards of the region are resilient and adaptive enough to counterbalance the obvious effects of climate change, particularly the unrelenting increase in average day temperatures and volatile conditions of rain and drought, not to mention other calamities such as frost, hail and vine disease. It gives us hope that both man and nature can adapt to these circumstance and produce outstanding wines, both red and white.

“2022 is a paradox,” said Jean-Philippe Masclef, the technical director of Haut-Brion and La Mission Haut-Brion.  “We had extreme weather conditions. But we have fruit in our wines that is black and fresh and not cooked. It’s not pruney. We thought it would be like that, but no! It is a year that shows wines with beautiful balance. And they have no greenness. They are fresh. It’s astonishing. Nothing is out of balance.”

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All the winemakers I spoke to during my three-week trip to Bordeaux commented on how the early heat in the spring set up the vines for the brutally hot and dry summer growing season, not to mention some critical rains in June and a few storms in August. “You can’t doubt the capacity of the vines,” Masclef said. “They can adapt!”

They also had the experience of the continuous hot and dry vintages of 2018, 2019 and 2020. They used various techniques to combat the intense sun, from leaving full canopies of leaves to shade grapes to dialing in slightly larger crops to preserve the freshness and obtain slightly lower alcohol levels. They also focused on picking their grapes at optimal ripeness, with this “al dente” fruit giving a crunchy and clean character to the wines, with fine yet structured tannins.

It’s fascinating to think that even a decade ago Bordeaux producers were still searching for bold ripeness, but today they are doing the complete opposite because of the growing heat and dryness.

Some winemakers say that one of the key factors in 2022 was the extensive rain in June and two days of showers in August. “Without those two episodes of rain, the profile of the wines would not have been what they are,” said Christian Seely, the head of AXA wines, including Pichon-Baron and Suduiraut.

He made an extraordinary young Sauternes at Suduiraut in 2022, perhaps the greatest sweet wine ever made there. It highlights the greatness of the 2022 vintage for sweet wines, with a short but concentrated development of botrytis in mid-October.

SHADES OF 2003

Like many other winemakers, Nicolas Thienpont, a consulting enologist who with his team works for a number of well-known wineries, including the prestigious St. Emilion estate of Larcis Ducasse, was worried before the harvest that they would make another 2003, which was a vintage of extreme heat and dryness that produced thick, high-alcohol and unbalanced wines.

“We haven’t harvested this early since 2003, but the wines are fresher and not as heavy,” he said while we tasted in the cellars of Larcis Ducasse early one morning last week. “Our extractions were light because we had higher potential alcohol. Cabernet franc had much less juice, so you had to pay attention.”

He also pointed out that they didn’t have the same winemaking technique in 2003. “We didn’t have sorters,” he said. “We had different pumps overall. We used 100 percent new wood. It was blah! Our wines in 2022 are not in the style of a sunny vintage that made wines heavy and overly fruity.”

Indeed, it appears that most people making wine in Bordeaux in 2022 didn’t make anything close to the 2003. Their 2022 wines can be flamboyant, fruity and tannic, yet they have a freshness and form that give them energy and vitality. They are exciting and not overly tiring to taste even though they are few months old and straight from barrel. I was worried they would be difficult young wines with burning alcohol and too much tannin, yet the young wines were dynamic and fascinating to evaluate as a wine taster regardless of whether they were made in a small chateau on the fringes of the region or great domains in key wine districts.

In all, I rated more than 1,100 wines with Associate Editor Andrii Stetsiuk. It was a massive tasting over three weeks. We met with more than 100 winemakers and visited dozens of wineries and wine consultants’ offices. I have to admit that it was demanding, but it was a joyous and fascinating experience to taste so many special wines. And there was high quality from top to bottom.

"You know that it’s a great vintage when small chateaux and great ones make outstanding quality wines,” said Jean-Guillaume Prats, the managing director of Leoville Las Cases, which made an ethereal wine. “This is a very special vintage.”

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Prats is part of the contemporary history of Bordeaux, considering that his father, who is still making wine, began working in Bordeaux in the 1950s. His son, Jean-Quentin, is a wine merchant with Maison Joanne in Bordeaux.

The 2022 vintage really is something unique, although one winemaker pointed out that there have been many days of hot weather in past summers, although it hadn’t really happened on the same level as 2022 since the late 1940s, which produced the legendary vintages of 1947 and 1949. I obviously wasn’t there (I am not that old!), but I have had the opportunity to drink wines from these vintages on occasion and they both produced long-lived wines with ripeness and freshness at the same time. My old wine merchant friend in Bordeaux, Pierre Lawton, made the comparison last week when he came for dinner last week: 2022 “definitely produced wines like the 1949,” he said.

What was interesting about those vintages was that they were relatively drinkable when they were young, and some wine merchants at the time believed they didn’t have the capacity to age because they were so attractive in the beginning.

OLD LESSONS FOR NEW WINES

I have written this before, but one of the great lessons in fine wine I learned 40 years ago was tasting Bordeaux’s 1982 vintage with some of the great historical vintners of the time, including Alexis Lichine, Anthony Barton, Jean Michel Cases, Hugh Lawton, Jean Eugene Borie and Bruno Prats. We tasted all their wines together during a lunch at Prieure-Lichine during the first VinExpo in 1983, and they all said that 1982 was great because of its early balance, richness and structure, and that the wine would be great from barrel and later in bottle. The 1982 vintage continues to be a benchmark for modern Bordeaux.

The 2022 is not the same as 1982, but its wines share some of the attractive youthful character, even though strong tannins are hidden under the fruit. The wines of 2022 also share some of the character of wines from recent hot vintages like 2015, 2018 and 2020 as well as the tannins of 2016.

In tasting the young barrel samples, the best quality wines of 2022 had exceptional fruit and freshness as well as fine and intense tannins. A few were overdone, and I marked down some big names for wines with too much tannin and/or too much fruit. Perhaps cellar aging over the next 18 months will tame the wines, but most of the outstanding quality wines I tasted (there were a lot) already showed the impressive filigree and harmony I look for in new, classically structured Bordeaux. That fact that I wasn’t tired after tasting close to 100 wines a day highlighted this attractive nature in the 2022s.

My only concern – and that of a number of Bordeaux winemakers I spoke to – is how the wine will age in cellars. The reds already show such balance and harmony that I feel a sense of fragility in them. I hope winemakers don’t overdo the aging with too much new wood or oxidative processes such as racking. Most winemakers I spoke to said that they would be more reductive in their aging and reduce the wines’ exposure to oxygen, new wood, handling and sulfur.

“We will be more reductive and use less SO2,” said Mathieu Bessonnet of Pontet-Canet. “We want to preserve the fruity aromas and flavors.”

En primeur, or future sales, of the 2022 should be in May or June, and I expect prices will be high. Everyone I spoke to said that they thought prices would increase.

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"Interest is strong, and we expect demand to follow," said Mathieu Chadronnier, the head of the prestigious Bordeaux wine negociant CVBG. "But when it comes to price, it belongs to the consumer, and to the consumer only to decide whether it is right or not."

It’s the same old story with pricing of en primeur: the market will decide. But high interest rates, volatile stock prices and recent bank failures may make some buyers uneasy with tying their money up in futures of young Bordeaux. The quality of the wines in 2022, however, is exceptional.

– James Suckling, Editor/Chairman

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