most 2021 reds are acidic and overpriced

A word of advice: give 2021 red bordeaux a wide berth. Every January, a group of 20 of us wine professionals meets to sample the four-year-old vintage at Farr Vintners’ offices in Wandsworth. I’ve just tasted the 157 most important examples blind in peer groups and I’m afraid to say that it was not a joyful experience.

There was one silver lining. The growing season was beset by downy mildew, rain and unusually low temperatures. The result was wines relatively low in both alcohol — 13 to 13.5 per cent generally — and tannin, the two ingredients that are most wearing for tasters. So we didn’t find this year’s tasting too tiring (though examination of my teeth afterwards suggested that the wines didn’t lack colour).

What the wines did have in abundance was acidity, often with a certain greenness associated with underripe fruit. Few had presence in the mouth. The odd one had a flashy nose, often assisted by oak, but not many could offer a tasting experience that had a beginning, middle and end.

As a very general rule, Merlot was more badly affected by the challenges of the 2021 growing season than Cabernet Sauvignon so the St-Émilions and, to a lesser extent, Pomerols were for the most part among the least pleasing 2021s. The St-Estèphes were arguably closest to how they taste in a more successful vintage, because they are usually a little lean and “stony” tasting. Pessac-Léognan, the crème de la crème of the old Graves region, was the appellation responsible for the greatest number of my favourite wines, while St-Julien was the most consistent appellation.

Not all bordeaux 2021s are disappointing. All that acidity stood the dry whites in good stead. The best are already delicious and should have a good life ahead of them. And although spring frost was so devastating in the Sauternes region that many properties were unable to make any sweet wine at all, those estates that had grapes still on the vine into October were rewarded with some very attractive sweet wines, and a ridiculously underpriced one in the case of Bastor-Lamontagne.

In general, however, price is a real problem. The excellent 2019 vintage had been launched during lockdown at (relatively) low prices so the châteaux owners tried to compensate by dramatic price rises for the 2020s — partly justified — and the same price levels for the extremely weak 2021s, which was completely unjustified. Even the finest 2021s, such as those listed below, are clearly inferior to their counterparts produced in 2019, 2020 and 2022 vintages (which are three of Bordeaux’s finest this century).

With the blatant mispricing of the 2021 wines, which the négociants, the middlemen, can now sell only with difficulty and at a loss, the Bordeaux wine establishment has definitively lost the confidence of those who used to regularly buy bordeaux en primeur, as futures. It is just so obvious that older vintages offer much better value, and sales of smart bordeaux over the past couple of years have been sluggish to say the least.

At last month’s tasting of 2021s, the lesser wines of appellations St-Émilion and Médoc absolutely demonstrated why wine drinkers have fallen out of love with bordeaux. The wines lacked fruit and tasted bone dry and charmless. The 2021s are not the most tannic red wines from Bordeaux but the region’s reds are typically much chewier in youth than most reds made today.

Mispricing isn’t the only reason for the slowdown. All the great Bordeaux wines need years and years of expensive cellaring to show their full glory. The cohort of wine drinkers prepared to establish and nurture a wine collection over time is shrinking every year. Meanwhile winemakers across the world are producing an increasing and exciting array of much more approachable and varied wines.

I recently had my first chance to taste the smarter bordeaux from the 2022 vintage now that they are safely in bottle — rather than the embryonic cask samples shown during the en primeur circus just a few months after the harvest. Unlike last month’s tasting of 2021s, the 2022s were not served blind but I could see how impressive they were. So much fruitier and more satisfying than the 2021s, they were also stuffed full of ripe tannins, so 2022 should eventually be a superlative vintage, but it will demand long ageing. So next year’s blind tasting of four-year-old bordeaux is expected to be more tiring, even if more rewarding, than this year’s.

But Bordeaux wine’s woes are certainly not limited to the most expensive wines. The lower-ranked producers are finding it even more difficult to find customers, with the result that they are being officially subsidised to pull out thousands of hectares of vines surplus to current requirements, notably in Entre-Deux-Mers and northern Médoc. They have fallen victim to the dramatic shrinkage of their major market, French consumers of inexpensive red.

Most of the wines in last month’s tasting were “classed growths”, or crus classés, from châteaux included in the famous 1855 classification of then-reckoned-superior producers. In the 1930s, when the wine market was in an even more parlous state than it is now, a group of producers below the crus classés was also classified, the crus bourgeois of the Médoc.

This category continues to be tweaked — a revised bourgeois classification has just been announced — but tends to comprise estates on less propitious terroirs than those of the crus classés. This means they produce wines that have less ageing potential because the wines are less concentrated. And this means that in weak, underripe vintages such as 2021, the crus bourgeois really struggle. But in ripe, successful vintages such as 2022, some of the crus bourgeois can be real bargains because they are generally much less expensive than the crus classés.

Another recent bordeaux tasting I undertook was of 2022 crus bourgeois. Some of them were worth seeking out by those looking for red bordeaux that’s of good, classic quality but doesn’t need extensive ageing.

There are four times as many crus bourgeois as crus classés, about 250, and their big problem is distribution. The négociants are already sitting on mammoth stocks of crus classés, the cost of which is even more crippling with current interest rates, so they have little interest in trading in the much less valuable crus bourgeois.

The crus bourgeois therefore mostly have to be sold directly rather than relying on the well-established Bordeaux trading network. Because the crus bourgeois are not expensive, the associated margins are relatively low. And because there are so many of them, work is needed to decide which to buy. Most importers therefore choose to ignore this useful category and similarly well-priced red bordeaux. Exceptions to this rule in the UK include The Wine Society and Haynes Hanson & Clark.

A significant proportion of the 64 2022 crus bourgeois I tasted were listed in the tasting booklet as “£15 to £20 a bottle” and “seeking a UK importer”. This is a shame as red bordeaux below cru classé level, from a ripe vintage, can offer some of the best wine value in the world today.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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