After tasting two hundred plus wines in the past week, I’ve found plenty of fruit, tannin and acid, not always in that order, but certainly in number in Bordeaux 2010. There is a lot of everything in Bordeaux 2010. Lots of colour, often dense saturated colour across the board, but then there is also plenty of extract, tannin and acid, and then more acid and tannin still. It makes the wines a bit tricky to judge. In fact I spent a lot of time re-tasting wines because I found some difficult to evaluate. 2010 is a great vintage in many respects, but there is irregularity too. Winemaking judgement was exceptionally important in this vintage, with such dense, thick and concentrated berries those properties with a lightness of touch and flexibility have made the best wines. Those that have extracted too much have made monsters, with tannins and grip to match, not that the wines divide so neatly into those camps, I wish it were that easy. 2009 was undoubtedly more straightforward to judge at the same stage last year.

Overall Bordeaux 2006 reds can be summed up as firm, quite strong, structured wines, but for me often a bit joyless. This was certainly my immediate impression having tasted ninety or so wines from the vintage at the Master of Wine Institute’s Annual Claret tasting that took place in the wonderfully oak panelled, if rather gloomy, Vintners Hall last week. The best wines had good structure, acid and enough flesh to make complex wine eventually but the best do need time in bottle. Even mature these will always be firm wines I reckon as in this vintage there is plenty of tannin, albeit it ripe and fine enough. There were also quite a few disappointments and the vintage is not consistent across all the appellations.

2009 is a beautiful vintage here in Pomerol. Lovely wines full of attractive fruit with concentration and intensity. Extraction very much in check compared with St Emilion. Seductive and packed with fruit, these are wines that should be approachable early and some are already showing well. The following were tasted at Chateau Gazin as part of the Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux tastings.

Just returned from a week-long trip to Bordeaux to taste the principal wines from the 2009 vintage and I have to admit that these wines are amongst the finest young reds I have ever tasted.  It is a truly extraordinary vintage in the Médoc, the best ‘Cabernet’ year in living memory. It is a vintage in which many of the classed growths are nudging nearly fourteen degrees in alcohol and yet somehow manage to display extraordinary levels of balance.  It also looks extremely good in Pessac-Léognan, is beautiful year in Pomerol and has produced the best sweet wine vintage for Sauternes and Barsac since 2001.