Didier Cuvelier and his team have fashioned something intense and structured at Château Léoville Poyferré in 2013. It is a serious effort that will be more long-term than most. Château Le Moulin Riche, their second St Julien property [not to be confused with Pavillon de Poyferré, the second wine here] is creamy and polished. There’s still some wood to integrate on the palate but there is quite a bit of blackcurrant fruit.
St Julien has produced a number of sensational wines in 2009. The best have tremendous power, richness and wonderfully ripe tannin. All three Léovilles are terrific, though very, very different. Château Léoville-Las-Cases is a giant with tremendous depth and power. Château Léoville Poyferré feels genuinely perfect. It is already spellbindingly seductive. Château Léoville Barton has great purity and depth. It is incredibly fresh and very long. It needs a decade in the cellar for sure but it remains at a bargain price compared to the others.
There’s lots of freshness, structure and grippy fruit evident in the wines of St Julien now they are in bottle. 2011 doesn’t have the excitement of the two glorious vintages that preceded it. In fact it’s a bit of a freezing cold shower by comparison. What we seem to have are elegant, tightly structured reds that should work out OK in the mid-term but there is certainly a lot of grip and acid present in most of the wines just now. Perhaps more than any other appellation, save for Pauillac, [notes up next], these wines demand time in the cellar [though not too much time mind]. In five to eight years they should make reasonable medium weight wines though many will still be introspective and lean.
The clues were there. Fewer big gun proprietors stood behind the tables at this year’s Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux tasting. Some château regulars to Covent Garden were missing completely. And the braying roar of excitement from the trade that accompanied the 2009 and 2010 in-bottle tastings was missing here, replaced by a low, gentle, pinstriped murmur, ‘What on earth are we going to do with this vintage?’ I’m exaggerating a little because there were some good Bordeaux reds from 2011 on offer at the tasting, though relatively few set the pulse really racing. The real joy in this vintage is amongst the whites, particularly the sweet wines of Sauternes and Barsac, and the dry whites from Pessac-Léognan, though that’s not much consolation for a region mostly concerned with red wine production.
