The good news is that 2024 is a year to buy if you are looking for wines to drink within the next 10 years… a comment we increasingly hear from customers, so let’s take it as a positive! Much discussion revolves around how challenging the season was, creating wines more elegant and lighter-bodied than in recent vintages. However, the Bordelais, and certainly the ones we have known and bought from for years, are at the forefront of modern technology and are able to make good wine regardless of the weather. Grandfather is banished to the bar, father is put on a tractor, while today’s winemaking sons and daughters wheel out the computer-driven optical sorting table that evaluates each grape that passes its laser eye, only permitting the healthy and ripe to enter the winery. Rest happy that there is good, short term drinking claret to buy from 2024.
The differences between a ‘great’ growing year and a ‘challenging’ one are actually quite slim. If you look at bald statistics, 2024 might be talked about like 1994 – not a great comparison. However, taking the 30-year average and breaking all vintages into hot / cold, wet / dry, you find that 1999 is surprisingly similar, and it made some nice wines, while the lauded 2020 was hotter and only a touch less damp, but features in the same ‘quadrat’ so to speak. Of course, such a vintage comparison is not as simple as those four markers: in 2024 there was a lot of rain in May which upset flowering and encouraged mildew, and September was wet too. While there was little frost to cut yields, the rampant and persistent mildew did that, accounting for the smallest harvest since 1991. A dry July and August brought things back on track, before extended wet weather in September prevented the sort of late ripening ‘save’ seen in many recent vintages. Harvest was two weeks later than 2023, but sugar levels rose only slowly, and acidity stayed high. Alcohol levels are mainly 13.5% or less.
The ‘En Primeur’ question of course is about price. In fact, many Tanners favourites still only cost a fraction more than they did 10 or so years ago: Cissac a notable example. Others such as Batailley and Angludet still manage to offer very good value among their peer group, and remarkably good for the quality of wine, particularly as they age a bit, when you consider other wines around the globe. In our minds, this still makes them a good buy (allowing that as I write we haven’t tasted much yet). Higher up the scale in the rarified air of classed growths, we will have to guide you through the value we, and the critics, perceive when prices are released. Suffice to say that there is still a great deal of wine from previous vintages lying unsold in Bordeaux, and we live in turbulent times. At least if you do secure your favourites, at a fair opening price, you can drink them with a smile not a scowl. Once again it looks like many top châteaux will release early, before mid May. Do keep an eye on our website or register with us to be kept informed.
