[VINTAGE REPORT] 2019 Bordeaux Joins Sterling Trio Capping Historic Decade

Wine producers in Bordeaux are saying that the 2019 is always great: great from the barrel, great from the bottle and great from the cellar. Whether it turns out to be as exceptional in quality as other years that made open and beautiful wines after bottling, such as 1982, 1990, 2009, and 2015, remains to be seen but the 2019 delivers some fantastic wines, both white and red. And I recommend buying them. They were released at relatively reasonable prices as en primeur, and they remain so depending on the wine.

“I love the vintage because it was always, always delicious,” Eric Kohler, the technical director of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild and Duhart Milon, said during a Zoom interview tasting his 2019 wines. The Lafite 2019 is one of the wines of the vintage. “The fruit was delicious before the harvest. The juice was delicious before the vinification, during the vinification, after malolactic and at the beginning of aging,” Kohler said. “You remember en primeur? This vintage always had a great harmony, a perfect balance and freshness. It has an incredible concentration but no aggressivity at all. And it continued like that.”

Harmony, balance and freshness are definitely the hallmarks of the 2019 after tasting and rating almost 1,500 Bordeaux from the vintage. The reds in general have a cool fruit character to them, despite the hot grape-growing season, and they also show fine, integrated tannins and bright finishes. They were extremely aromatic and perfumed from the outset, with complexity in fruit and soil-derived nuances such as flowers, wet earth, mushrooms and bark. The greatest wines now change all the time in the glass, both with aromatics and flavors.

I have always loved vintages that make great wines that impress you with the nose before the palate. And 2019 does just that.

The top dry whites are surprisingly reserved and creamy in texture with attractive ripe fruit character and tensioned acidity. The Haut-Brion white, for example, is an incredible wine with superb structure and depth. Sweet wines were less successful due to a limited amount of botrytis development in the vineyards, but Sauternes and Barsac made some attractive wines for early drinking.

“With the 2019 we have managed overall to have reds with beautiful maturity yet with a certain freshness,” said Edouard Moueix, who made terrific wines at Belair-Monange, Lafleur Petrus and Trotanoy. “That’s the great element of 2019.”

Moueix said that he prefers the 2019 to the 2018 because the wines have a more subtle character and are “less violent” in nature. I agree, although the 2018s are also very impressive because of their warmer, more flamboyant and powerful style. But it’s the 2019 that I prefer. When I taste the 2019s, I had some of the same feelings of tasting the 2015s and 2009s from barrel and bottle. I remember the 1990s and 1982s in the same light. They all gave wonderful pleasure in their youth and aged incredibly well.

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Philippe Bascaules, the managing director of Chateau Margaux, another reference red for 2019, said he remembers “the charm of the 1990, the 1996” when he drinks the 2019s. “But it’s not the same wine. We can’t compare it, really,” he said. “I was not there but I heard that some people had the same feeling [with the 2019] as the 1982. That was the impression, and the 2019 is so easy to drink, even now. It is a wine that will give lots of pleasure.”

A better comparison, he said, would be 2015. “In ’15 you have the opulence and the charm and still the concentration. So, 2019 is very similar to 2015.”

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It’s impressive to think that 2019 is part of a trilogy of top vintages – 2018, 2019 and 2020. But it’s also part of a string of high-quality years that has never been seen in the history of the region: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 (some major frost but many excellent wines made), 2018, 2019 and 2020. It was a great decade. The only washout was 2013. The golden decade of the 1980s can compare to the above years, but consecutive excellent-quality vintages did not happen. And the quality and precision in viticulture and winemaking then were nothing like today.

I am happy that I lived and experienced both periods as a wine critic, journalist and Bordeaux wine lover. If the 1980s was a golden decade for quality Bordeaux wine, the 2010s could be called a platinum decade. It certainly is a historical moment to buy and drink Bordeaux.

“With vintages such as 2018, 2019 and 2020, we are certainly on a very high level of the podium for wine quality,” said Bruno Borie, who made a superbly racy Ducru-Beaucaillou in 2019. “We have been very lucky with the climate, the technology and the motivation… You need the motivation to make great wines.”

We are going to be debating for years which vintage of the three is best. At the moment I like the 2019 the best because it produced so many “real Bordeaux.” The 2019 reds have the character and nature of what Bordeaux can only do with cabernet or merlot.  They are rich and structured, yet they retain wonderful freshness and brightness. They can’t be confused with cabernets or merlots from warmer places. I understand that some people may prefer reds from the more opulent and riper 2018 and 2020, but 2019 is more typical, or “classic,” as the Bordelais themselves describe the vintage.

VIEW FROM THE LEFT BANK

CHATEAU GISCOURS

CHATEAU MOUTON ROTHSCHILD

CHATEAU SMITH HAUT LAFITTE

CHATEAU MARGAUX

DOMAINES DELON

CHATEAU LYNCH-BAGES

CHATEAU LAFITE ROTHSCHILD

CHATEAU HAUT-BAGES LIBERAL/CHATEAU DURFORT VIVENS

HOT DAYS, COOLER NIGHTS

The climate in 2019, however, was not all that classic, but a combination of hot weather during the summer with a few key rainstorms as well as cool nights in August and September helped the grapes ripen to excellent maturity levels as well as maintain acidity. The mild and wet winter was a good start for the vines. Spring was normal with some frost and hail in certain areas. The bud break and flowering went well enough, although some grape growers reported shot berries and uneven berry set. Hot weather kicked in during June and kept going the whole summer. The hottest day of the growing season was July 23, with a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius (100 Fahrenheit). Some heavy rains arrived a few days later and revived the vines. It was warm and mostly dry in August and early September with a few rainstorms here and there.

“In August and September, the nights were cool,” Borie added. “All the nights [at that time] were below 25 Celsius. You had many hot days above 35 Celsius but the nights were not that hot.” This, he pointed out, was the key to maintaining freshness and acidity in the wines.

Most chateaus began harvesting the first week of September. The weather was clear and dry until the third week, when a good amount of rain fell. A number of producers in Zoom interviews mentioned how these rains at the end of September revived their grapes, particularly in the Medoc. A large part of the vineyards in the Right Bank were already harvested. Grapes were relatively small with thick skins, so this may have helped combat some of the moisture. Regardless, Bordeaux winemakers are accustomed to dealing with some rain during the harvest. The moisture may have also reduced some of the sugar in the unpicked grapes. Wines are slightly lower in alcohol in 2019 compared with 2018.

VIEW FROM THE RIGHT BANK

CHATEAU L'EGLISE CLINET

CHATEAU LAFLEUR

CHATEAU PAVIE

CHATEAU CHEVAL BLANC

JEAN-PIERRE MOUIEX

CHATEAU AUSONE

RIGHT BANK OPULENCE

I haven’t deeply analyzed our wine ratings, but I have a slight preference for the Right Bank, particularly Pomerol, in 2019. The wines have the opulence of the 2015s but the freshness and tension of 2016. My tasting team and I loved so many wines from the district – from lesser-known estates on sandy soils to the great names on the clay knoll such as Lafleur, La Conseillante and Vieux Chateau Certan. L’Eglise Clinet was also fantastic.

St Emilion was almost as exciting. And it seems like you can buy across the board in the district. The two stars were the great estates of the area: Ausone and Cheval Blanc. Both received perfect scores. In fact, I have never tasted a young Cheval Blanc like the 2019. Its depth and structure are incredible. It has an almost Medoc sensibility with its structure and length. Plus, there’s a menthol and graphite character in the wine, suggesting the 8 percent of the cabernet sauvignon in the blend was ripened to perfection.

“You see the impact of the freshness and the acidity [in tasting the 2019 Cheval Blanc],” said Pierre-Olivier Clouet, the technical director of Cheval Blanc. “It’s rare in some wine to have the volume, the depth, the density and the power plus the freshness, the acidity and the delicacy.” He said that all the different plots of vineyards at Cheval brought unique character, from the young vines of cabernet franc to old merlot. “It brings energy to the wine, just like a family with teenagers at the table compared to the old people.”

This doesn’t mean that Pessac-Leognan or the Medoc did not make some great and many outstanding wines. For example, Haut-Brion arguably made the red wine of the vintage with its incredibly complex and complete structure and depth. In fact, all the first growths I tasted were perfect wines, highlighting the fabulous quality of the vintage.

However, some lesser estates in the Haut Medoc and Graves made some good but not exciting wines, with some showing dilution or marginal ripeness. This could be from larger grape crops or a mismanaged harvest. The Right Bank seemed more consistent in quality to us. This inconsistency was also apparent in some satellite appellations in areas such as the Cotes de Bordeaux or simple Bordeaux and Bordeaux Superior.

It sounds like a cliché, but the best terroirs or vineyards made the best wines in 2019, with a few exceptions. Winemakers spoke about how vineyards with soils that retained moisture through the hot and dry summer produced the highest quality wines. These were soils that included clay or limestone. Meanwhile, sandy soils suffered the most. Some vines stopped growing in the late summer because of the hot and dry weather, and they could not hold on to moisture during the periodic rainstorms. This led to inconsistent ripening in grapes as well as dehydration.

Almost all the star chateaux received perfect scores, including Ausone, Cheval Blanc, Haut-Brion (white and red), Lafite Rothschild, Lafleur, Margaux and Mouton Rothschild. I didn’t rate Latour, Petrus or Le Pin, but they must be incredible. Yet, it’s interesting that I found almost double the number of perfect wines in my tastings of the 2015 vintage from bottle –  if perfect wines are any indication of the overall quality of the vintage. The 2016 vintage has the same number of 100-point wines as 2019. The 2018 vintage only had four 100-point wines.

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The number of wines that received scores of 95 points or more may be a better indicator of the greatness of a vintage, and 165 wines rated as such in 2019. That’s out of the almost 1,500 wines reviewed. We rated 138 wines 95 points or better in 2015 but we only rated 1,257 wines. By comparison, 2018 had 134 wines at 95 points or more out of the 1,290 rated.

The bottom line is that 2019 produced hundreds of outstanding-quality wines that were rated in this report. And some amazing bottles were also produced. Plus, some people may have forgotten, or even didn’t know, that the wines were released as en primeur or futures on the market about five or six months into the global COVID crisis in 2020, and many wine producers dropped their prices anywhere from 10 percent to 40 percent. A lot of 2019 Bordeaux was sold, even in this difficult period, because they were viewed as relatively good buys.

“The en primeur campaign was postponed because of the pandemic,’ said Jean-Charles Cazes, an owner of Lynch Bages as well as Haut-Batailley. “People couldn’t taste the wines in Bordeaux. Samples were sent to our most important customers [and critics] and then there was a good window to release the wines in June. And there was an opening [from COVID] and people were getting back to a normal life with a desire to believe in the future,” he said. “And Bordeaux gave a compelling reason for people to put their money down on wines… There was a lot of enthusiasm about the 2019. All the planets were aligned.”

And it wasn’t just about the attractive prices. I still remember the joy and fascination of tasting more than 1,000 barrel samples in my office in Hong Kong, and the young, unfinished wines were fantastic quality. They showed such a captivating balance of ripe fruit, fine tannins and fresh acidity. They were hard not to drink in some cases.

I had the same feelings of joy with my team tasting and rating so many of 2019s from bottle over the last five weeks. It’s a vintage that made outstanding wines that will please you today and in the future for decades to come.

– James Suckling, Chairman/Editor