Amongst the star wines from Pessac Léognan on show at the MW Institute last autumn, the quality of Château Haut-Brion and Château La Mission Haut-Brion should come as no surprise. Both were still pretty backward and need another decade to open up but there was fantastic depth and weight to both. La Mission was fractionally more open, with mouth-watering fruit and freshness. It was forthcoming on the nose with plenty of blackcurrant fruit, plums and spices. Haut-Brion had a significant frame and density but this remains pretty closed. Château Haut-Bailly tasted in between these two really impressed. This is qualitatively almost equal to the two Pessac siblings in this vintage. It has terrific freshness and life but plenty of depth. Give it time in a decanter and you can enjoy this already, but it has two or three decades ahead of it. Across the Pessac-Léognan lineup it was Château Smith Haut Lafitte that stole the show on the day. This property shows great consistency, year in, year out. The 2019 here is super impressive. Plush blackcurrants and plums dominate a sumptuous aromatic profile but the palate maintains freshness alongside layers of fruit and the ripest of tannins. It’s magnificent.

2014 is a good to very good vintage for the red wines of Pessac-Léognan. The best have very attractive aromatic profiles, plenty of depth and texture to the fruit, and attractive freshness and acidity. There is a general sense that the wines need to round out and fill in further during elévage, but many show real promise. A few of the lesser properties lack concentration and in a few cases tannins were a little tough. Haut-Brion, followed by Haut-Bailly, Smith Haut Lafitte, La Mission Haut-Brion, Domaine de Chevalier and Pape Clément, have all produced very impressive wines.  Behind these Olivier [especially] along with Bouscaut, Carbonnieux, de Fieuzal, and Latour-Martillac have produced reds of note. Again these wines are often priced competitively compared to wines of a similar quality in the Haut-Médoc appellations such as Pauillac and St Julien. Many, though by no means all, have been released at prices below that of comparable vintages [2008 for example] which makes them worth considering this year.

There’s a very fresh, saline quality to the whites of Pessac-Léognan in 2013 and overall the vintage looks successful. Comparisons are being made with 2007 and 2010, but with greater acidity than the latter. Certainly the wines are marked by freshness, emphasized partly as they are a bit less weighty with fractionally lower alcohols than usual. None of this is a bad thing. It makes makes for complex, nuanced and appetizing dry white wines.

Several wonderful red wines have been made in Pessac-Léognan this year but the real successes are amongst the whites, not just up at the highest echelons but further down there are many refreshing, fruity white wines to be had too. The very best are rich, weighty, almost fat, with a fraction less zip than 2011, but very attractive nevertheless. The reds? I found them a little bit of a mixed bunch. There is no doubt that the wet weather caused problems for the Cabernets as it did elsewhere. Some of the Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon, while certainly ‘fresh’, were often angular in tannin, and many are a bit ‘grippy’ and ‘chewy’, even despite the fat, ripe Merlot on offer. My overall feeling with these is that you need to tread carefully. That said, it’s clear that great effort was put in by proprietors to try and make the very best reds they could in a challenging year, one that got increasingly so as the harvest progressed.