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I would like to start by mentioning two important points that are too often overlooked.
ART: Making wine is farming and making good wine is good farming, but making great wine is art. The senses of taste and smell just as the senses of sight, touch and hearing are those of painting, sculpting and music. Great artists are rare and consequently truly great wines are rare and this is as true here in Bordeaux and for the 2015 vintage as any other wine making region in the world. Great wine is the art of balancing freshness, fruit and aromatic power together with alcohol, acidity and tannins.
COST: If you can sell your wine at very high prices you can afford to cosset each and every vine throughout the year. You can afford to do all the expensive operations such as green pruning, leaf thinning, canopy management, pinching out the unwanted shoots, etc. Operations that Denis Dubourdieu describes as “luxuries”. If you have to struggle to sell tour wine at almost any price, as is the case with so many smaller properties, all this is beyond you.
Also, if you can afford to put only 30% of your yield into your first wine (if you have the luxury of having a second or even a third) and sell the rest very much cheaper, then of course you can only use your very best grapes to make a very much finer wine. I must stress in this respect how different were the opinions and approaches of some of the great Châteaux in 2015. Château Margaux only put 35% of its crop into the First Wine, whilst Cheval Blanc thought all its grapes were so good that they opted not to make Petit Cheval and put 92% of their yield into the Cheval Blanc. Cost is highly restrictive and today considerable available funds are essential if a producer wishes to join the ranks of great wine.
PERCEPTIVE COMMENTS BY TWO GREAT WINEMAKERS
The much-loved late Paul Pontallier of Château Margaux made a perceptive observation about the vintage shortly before his death from cancer: ‘August saved the vintage, September and October made it.’ The very cool weather and intermittent rain in August revitalised the vines after the fierce heat and hydric stress of July and the fine September and October weather permitted picking perfect grapes under ideal conditions.
The recently promoted Charles Chevallier of Château Lafite, on the other hand says, ‘When the grapes are ripe do not wait – Pick them.’ If the grapes become even fractionally overripe the acidity decreases and the resultant wines lack freshness and crispness.
YIELDS
Rarely do comments by growers vary so dramatically as for 2015. Some felt it had been a cold winter, others said it was warm. Some said warm spring, others fresh. Some said small yields, others were happy that they were relatively generous. Small seems to have predominated. Some said a precocious vintage, others normal. For each factor there is an opposite. Whatever I say somebody will disagree with me, so this article contains my personal conclusions. Yield is, of course, an essential for the survival of many and is perhaps the one factor that spoiled perfection to a certain extent for those whose yields were small. Being a cynic, I suspect that they will largely make up the deficiency by asking higher prices based on the exceptional quality!!
ALCOHOL
One of the most positive features of the vintage! With the perfectly ripe grapes one might have expected more sugar in the must, but with a few exceptions this was not the case and alcohol levels were under 14°. There were just a few exceptions such as Châteaux La Mission Haut Brion at 15.1°C, Haut Brion at 14.9°C and Petrus at 14.6°. The lower alcohols are good for the wines of Bordeaux that are not suited to New World alcohol levels, but should be wines with elegance, delicacy, purity, charm and finesse rather than intensity and power. Only the very great, like those mentioned above, can marry power and elegance with success. Naturally, picking early helped keep alcohol levels modest and strangely enough some people say that the sugar content in the grapes increased very little during the last days before picking helped by cool nights. Not everybody agrees.
TANNINS
As always, tannins are one of the most important elements in any red wine vital for its structure, and together with acidity, to its ageing potential. These are the two elements that enable a wine to enjoy a long life. They also help keep the freshness. This year many winemakers said they had rarely seen such perfect tannins, with perfect phenolic maturity in both skins and pips.
Angelus said pips started to ripen very early in August. Above all, perfectly ripe although both voluminous and forceful. 2015 was a vintage in which gentleness was of vital importance. Slow and gentle extraction at all costs, avoiding over-extraction and extracting the maximum of good tannins from the thick skins with plenty of it and the minimum from the pips even though ripe. Many said wonderful tension, massive but elegant. Skin and pip tannins came out quickly during the fermentation as soon as alcohol was present to dissolve them. Fermentation temperatures needed to be kept low (maximum 28°C) and post fermentation maceration kept reasonably short.
Because of the wonderful purity and silkiness of the ripe tannins the IPTs were relatively low. « Gently, gently catchee monkey » was the key phrase.“ Like a powerful car, too much acceleration and you go off the road”. Note that the IPT readings are not really so important and do not necessarily go hand in hand with tannin strength. They are more useful over a period of years. One grower described his tannins as, “fine, well-rounded, dense, with finesse, no rusticity and seamlessly smooth!” Many are soft, silky and charming already.
COLOUR
This of course goes hand in hand with tannins and they are the famous polyphenols. Colour was another plus in 2015. Because of the ripeness it came out of the skins quickly and because of the thick skins there was plenty of it. Also, grapes were small , together with those thick skins the ratio of solids to juice was high. The resultant colours were intense, deep, garnet and purple with crimson tints. Cold soaking (pre-fermentation maceration) was quite unnecessary; but the hard core did it all the same!
ACIDITIES
In my opinion, this was the one weak point of 2015 – the one flaw. Great winemakers avoided the trap but many fell into it. I stress that Denis Dubourdieu also agrees with me, the weather was so fine, the grapes so healthy and conditions so perfect that many felt that they could wait with no danger of rot – a situation rare in Bordeaux.
As Charles Chevallier commented, “When the grapes are ripe don’t wait - Pick them”. Even waiting a fraction too long meant that although the grapes remained healthy the acidities decreased below optimum levels with the result that the wines lost freshness and vitality and became a trifle flat. Finally, those who picked with perfect acidities made the great wines. The others were good and even excellent, but not great!
Acidity lends strength to a wine, whilst freshness lends tension, length and resistance. There were several factors that helped keep acidities at optimum levels, some of them manageable, others not:
- Concentration by evaporation helped by wind. The July drought and hydric stress helped keep the berries small.
- Early vintaging
- The pH of the soil
- Cool to very fresh nights during ripening after hot days
The malic acid content in the juice was relatively low in 2015 and as we all know, the malo-lactic fermentation transforms the malic into lactic acid, which is very much milder. Therefore, this is another reason why acidities needed not to be too low at harvesting! Again perfect acidities with ripe tannins were the ideal for the great wins.
FRUIT
Perhaps the biggest plus of the 2015 vintage. All great winemakers agree that 80% of great wine is made in the vineyards. In Bordeaux, with our humid climate, it is rare to have perfectly ripe and still perfectly healthy grapes right up to the end of the vintage. Hardly a grain of botrytis and no mildew. The fruit therefore was pure, crystalline and full of flavour and fragrance. There was no excuse! It is fruit like this, with warm, sunny days and cool nights, that winemakers dream about and that enable them to achieve their works of art. These are the wines whose aromas have supreme equilibrium, radiance and fragrance.
RIPENESS
Domaine de Chevalier said, “The best grapes this year had fine leaf canopies, well distributed bunches and deep coloured grapes”. Everything that I say in this article shows the rare perfection of the fruit. No rot or mildew, perfect health and perfect ripeness as long as growers did not wait too long and let the acidities decrease below optimum levels. A great rarity in our humid climate.
ROT
There was to all intents and purposes no rot and no mildew on the grapes for the 2015 vintage. Rare in Bordeaux, a joy for winemakers and an essential criterion for great wines! Apart from the fine weather, rot was also hindered by the thick skins. Where there was rot it was due to soil humidity, heavy dews and evapo-transpiration – not rain!
BODY
With such unusually excellent conditions and health, the red grapes contained plenty of everything and the resultant wines are rich and generous. Deep, ripe fruit. Powerful, but silky tannins and where picked at the right time- fresh, crisp tannins. Wines that will develop reasonably quickly, but remain full bodied and full flavoured. Concentration was helped by the fact that vegetative growth stopped earlier than usual, allowing all the goodness to go into the grapes and not the leaves and canopy. 2015s are full-bodied wines.
STRUCTURE
I put Structure in the title because all the above elements makeup the structure of the whole. A perfectly structured wine is one in which all the elements are in balance and blend together to make a harmonious whole – predominantly alcohols, tannins and acids. Structure is needed to balance sugar and alcohol with acidities and tannins. A well-structured and balanced wine will develop smoothly and correctly without fear of deviation or spoilage and make fine mature wine. This is essential for laying down and long-term enjoyment as well as investment. 2015 meets these criteria to the full!
PRESS WINE
These were excellent, but rarely used in the first wine due to the excellence and sound, solid structure of the main crop. They will make excellent second wines if correctly used.
BIO
If any vintage is good for biological viticulture in our humid climate, 2015 was one. Château Pontet Canet, the ultimate follower of this belief, made great wine. 13.5° alcohol, no green pruning at all and no de-leafing. 35% of its wine made in his now famous amphorae. Climens, who learned from Pontet Canet, also made great wine. Both were hugely helped by the rare lack of humidity and the clean, dry climate during the ripening period and vintage.
DRY WHITE WINES
It was an early vintage, which proved important. Some started the last week of August on the Sauvignon. Grapes were ripe and in perfect health and with the cool August and fresh nights acidities were still at optimum levels. The best wines are aromatic, wonderfully crisp, fresh, energetic, mineral and full flavoured. I cannot help mentioning here that the white Château Haut Brion and Pavillon du Château Margaux are no less than sublime.
A great year for growers who picked at optimum ripeness and did not wait too long! This is as true across the board for small producers as for the wines with established reputations. The Semillon gave the concentration, density and warmth and the Sauvignon its chiselled mineral freshness. There are some delicious little lesser known wines to be discovered.
SWEET WHITE WINES
The berries were small. There was powerful sugar production through photosynthesis. Rapid maturation on gravel soil and rapid development of botrytis. A great year for the finest. 2015 was the third earliest vintage in the history of Château d’Yquem. It started on 3rdSeptember and was all over by 21st October. Intermittent but perfectly timed rains brought on massive botrytis, which this year was wonderfully pure and concentrated and completely untainted with grey or acid rot.
hey four “tris” and their wine ended up with a pH of 3.65, an alcohol content of just 13.9° and a sugar content of 144grams/litre. This crystalline purity of the noble rot has made sweet wines of great finesse, purity, balance and freshness. Picked at around 21 Baumé they are light and “airy” in spite of their richness. (1 degree Baumé equals 17-18 grams of sugar when fermented). To add to the joy of sweet wine produces yields were correct and in some cases generous. Wines for relatively early drinking. A “pleasure” vintage.
COMPARISONS
I do not like comparisons, but everybody seems to want them. The choice by most producers seems to be 2005. The IPTs (indices polyphenols totaux), the pH and the balance seem similar, but the final taste and state of ripeness of the grapes do not.
CONCLUSION
An important point to note is that more and more growers are going their own way and making their own decisions instead of following the time-worn pattern. There is far less dogma. This makes for greater differences between wines, which without detracting from the quality, makes for greater excitement and variety.
A splendid summing up by Château Cheval Blanc, “powerful wine enveloped in wonderful softness”. Château Ducru Beaucaillou says “fruity, subtle, accurate, charming, structured, persistent”. Moueix said he had rarely seen, “such phenolic, aromatic and vegetal maturity. Perfect equilibrium.”A more than fine vintage and in the hands of the best winemakers superb and in the hands of the artists great.
 As noted the main fault of the vintage was picking too late and the resulting slight lack of acidity and freshness. At this early stage the red wines are juicy and fruit-driven. Correctly handled with perfect grapes at optimum ripeness there was no excuse not to make the best. In our humid climate such excellent conditions are rare and all criteria required for fine wines were fully met. Fine balanced, deep-fruited red wines, superbly crisp dry white wines and fragrant, “airy”, but liquorous sweet white wines. A vintage to gladden the hearts of growers across the board here in Bordeaux. As usual buyers should use their judgement and not rely on names and reputations!
Bordeaux Vintage 2015: Part 2- Analysis of Weather
John Salvi Master of Wine |