Overall 2010 is dense and intense in Pauillac. The wines are less easy to enjoy than ’09, without that easy flamboyance but they do have phenomenal strength and power, with lots tannin and grip too. It will be very interesting to see how they settle. So the best wines are different in style rather than in quality over ’09. Generally I was seduced more by the style of ’09 in Pauillac to ’10. That said amongst the first growths Mouton has produced an even better wine in ’10 than in ’09, Lafite is perfect but very concentrated and dense and feels less elegant and seductive over ’09. Latour is very dense, concentrated and quite amazing – and almost equalled by a quite extraordinary Les Forts de Latour. Carruades de Lafite is no slouch this year and neither is Le Petit Mouton de Mouton Rothschild.

Tasted on my first morning last week, Mouton was also the first of the first growths I tasted. I can remember last year’s 2009 clearly and my impression was that in 2010 Phillipe Dhalluin has actually trumped that wine. I also thought that Clerc Milon and d’Armailhac had switched characters slightly, the d’Armailhac slightly more reticent and the Clerc Milon seemingly more forward and come hither. Subsequent tastings at the Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux reversed this thought slightly, but there is no doubt that both have made exceptional wines in 2010, Clerc Milon especially. There is a concentration and a density to both these wines. Petit Mouton is also most certainly even better than 2009, and I was struck in general by the step change in the quality of the so called ‘second’ wines of the first growths tasted across the week.

There is something almost mythical about Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, the Pauillac that has produced some of the most profound, strongest and longest-lived wines of the commune. Its style is obviously very different from Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, though interestingly in 2009 the actual blend is not hugely different from it, with just marginally more Cabernet Sauvignon [88%] and correspondingly slightly less Merlot [12%]. Again the weather conditions in 2009 at Mouton, as at Lafite and in the rest of the Medoc, were virtually perfect. There were remarkable levels of sunshine and very little summer rainfall. This hydric stress, as Mouton described it, and fine weather meant that the grapes ripened slowly and to full maturity. September had hot days but cool nights, again perfect vintage conditions.

The UGCB Pauillac tastings

It is now certain that the Gods smiled on Bordeaux in 2009, perhaps nowhere more so than in Pauillac. Admittedly things look pretty exciting too in St Estèphe, St Julien and Margaux, but given the extraordinary success of Cabernet Sauvignon in this vintage it would be surprising if Pauillac wasn’t really up there, first among equals in this vintage. It is still early days of course and the wines are very young but the potential is tremendous.