Tasting Report: 2014 #Enprimeur May Be A Left Bank Vintage

I have tasted more than 250 samples of #enprimeur 2014 Bordeaux, and a pattern has already set in. The Left Bank wines are darker, richer and more structured than the Right Bank wines. Granted I have not tasted many of the top Right Bank wines such as Ausone or Cheval Blanc. However, I already have an impression that it's a Left Bank year, whereby the late harvest slightly favored châteaux with a high percentage of cabernet sauvignon in their vineyards.

For example, Charles Chevallier, the technical director of the Pauillac first growth Lafite-Rothschild that shares the same owner of Pomerol's L'Evangile, said that the grape growing in Pomerol was slightly wetter and botrytis more of a problem than in Pauillac.

"The challenge was finding the right time to pick and to find the correctly ripened grapes," he says. He added that this was not always easy.

Nonetheless, most of the barrel samples I have tasted so far have been very good to outstanding quality. I would put many of the Left Bank wines, particularly those from St. Julien, Pauillac and St. Estephe, at the same quality level as top wines from 1996. This was another year when the weather was gray and wet in August but a relatively sunny September and October produced excellent grapes for wine producers in the Medoc and they made outstanding reds. The 1996 vintage was less successful for wineries in Pomerol and St. Emilion. Many are now fading.

"I am very happy with what we produced considering the difficulty of the vintage," says Mouton-Rothschild technical director Philippe Dhalluin. "The wines are very accessible and harmonious with a mineral undertone."

Indeed, the wines have been relatively easy to taste and they already show an enormous amount of perfumes for being fledgling wines form the barrel. Moreover, they are very pure and clean on a whole making them straightforward to evaluate.

Again, the above are some thoughts on the vintage and I still have 250 more wines to sample. So these impressions could change. But I am positive about 2014.

Be sure to also check out my blog with my first notes from 2014 #enprimeur, which includes top-scoring reds such as first growths Lafite-Rothschild, Latour and Mouton-Rothschild as well as Ducru-Beaucaillou, Leoville Las Cases and Cos d'Estournel.