The 2018 Vintage

Weather, Challenges and Character of the Vintage

2018 was a game of two halves. The first half of the year was very wet, and then warm and wet, and that meant mildew, lots and lots of mildew and fighting against mildew all the time. Some properties fared very badly from this. At Château Palmer, ‘Jacques, who retired at the end of last year after 40 years as vineyard manager could not remember having ever seen such incredibly favourable conditions for the development of mildew in his entire career.’ Indeed, almost all the vintage bumpf issued by châteaux for primeurs visitors for 2018 pay homage to the men and women who worked relentlessly through the spring and early summer to save the crop. They read like tributes to firefighters after a bush fire, or frontline soldiers. It probably felt a bit like that. Those who are fully organic or biodynamic were hit hardest here. Some, like Palmer, were left with as little as 11hl/ha.

The game-two-half anology is not exactly my own idea. Both Veronique Sanders (Château Haut-Bailly) and Jean-Philippe Delmas (Châteaux La Mission / Haut-Brion, etc) point to France’s win in the Football World Cup on 15th July as the deciding moment. Delmas: ‘At 6.45pm, France sealed their second World Cup triumph, while outside the rain had come to a halt. The winegrower celebrated this moment in the presence of a clear sky. Little did he know that it would stay that way until the harvest…’ 

And so began a drought, and quite some heat, that would test vilticultural decisions for a second time, as well as the propensity of the individual terroirs to deal with the lack of further water. Ets. J-P Moueix wrote ‘The main characteristic of this vintage is the 1,136 hours of sunshine between June and September, a notable record of the past fifty years.’ Edouard Moueix told me he felt 2018 emphasized terroir strength and terroir weakness – it is a vintage of ‘extra’, of amplification. Those with yields reduced by mildew faced the additional challenge of keeping canopy and fruit in balance, not to produce monsters.

The one point most producers seemed to agree on was that the harvest conditions were such that châteaux could take their time and choose precisely the moment to pick each parcel. Looking at harvest dates, we can see a span often extending to one month even just for the reds. Veronique Sanders dubbed 2018 the ‘Freedom’ vintage, for its ideal harvest conditions that allowed for a ‘made to measure’ approach, plot by plot. 

This was to prove a vintage with an atypically high level of concentration: fruit density is high, colours are deep, tannin levels are naturally high, and alcohols seem to have achieved a ‘new normal’ of 14~15%. Very little that tasted ripe was also below 14% abv. Acidity levels are on the low side.

Selection was key this year for two opposite reasons: under-ripeness (I tasted some greenness here and there, perhaps due to vines shutting down during the drought), and over-ripeness (some Merlots were pushing 16% abv prior to blending).

Perhaps more than any vintage I can recall in recent times, extraction was also key. Due to small berries with thick skins from the drought it was easy to over-extract, and some – in my view – did over-extract. 

Impressions of the vintage, as sampled

The 2018s – the ones I think didn’t work as well as the ones I think did work – are all BIG wines. This is not the ‘luncheon claret’ type year we might recall from the ‘70s – ‘90s. 2018 just blows all that out of the water. Almost all of the wines showed really obvious alcohol – 14.5% is normal. ‘New normal’ perhaps because with climate change we are going to see this a lot more often I imagine. When in the 20th century was 14.5% a fairly average alcohol level for a Bordeaux grand vin? 

2018 is also big on extract – even from those who did a fine careful job with it. It’s a year naturally laden with tannin. I think a number of châteaux got things right all the way up to this point and then over-extracted. Some of those might come around, for some it will be decades of cellaring, and for some I think it will never really work. 

2018 is big on very ripe, sometimes roasted or ‘confit’ fruit. My wine trade friend Gilles Corre dubbed 2018 “l’année du canelé” – there is so much sweetness in so many of the wines.

Is this a good thing? It depends on your taste, or perhaps, on the spectrum of your taste. If you like big Napa Cabs, or just big generously-styled wines in general, this is a year for you! If your idea of a perfect Bordeaux year is 1978, look elsewhere – the 2017s for instance. 

But I do think there is a lot to enjoy here. Some of the wines are amongst the most exciting I have ever tasted, and I will dream about tasting them again someday. Lafleur put me in a complete headspin.

But you must understand that this is a BIG-styled year. Those who tried – I think – to push hard against the style of 2018 I don’t think did the best job either. You couldn’t really early-pick your way out of it, because with thick skins, full phenolic ripeness was critical. This was perhaps more important than keeping sugars at bay. 2018 demanded you make a fairly big wine. Secondly, read carefully any comments that I – or others – have writen about tannins. Some wines are going to take long-cellaring to show their potential.

Do you like the ripeness of 2009 or even 2003, and are fine with the tannins of 2005? Keep reading…

WHAT TO BUY OF THE 2018s, EN PRIMEUR

Firstly, as I’ve ready stated, if you don’t like BIG wines, you can probably skip 2018 altogether. They are, as I’ve written, at one bookend of the style spectrum Bordeaux is capable of, and this is not to everyone’s taste. 

But if you do like grand-scaled wines packed with fruit, and you don’t mind elevated alcohol levels (mostly above 14%), and have the patience to wait an extended period for them to become ready, there is plenty to buy here, including some real stars. It’s a question of taste.

Is this one of the Right Bank, or Left Bank years like 1998, or 1996? No, I don’t think so. When I look through my notes I can see that in the Right Bank the wines with a healthy proportion of Cabernets did well. Many growers I visited talked about the Cabernets being critical to the balance in the 2018s, and in some cases the proportion of Cabernets in the grand vin relative to planting ratios in the vineyard was higher in 2018. 

In the Left Bank, I was particularly taken with Les Carmes Haut-Brion who somehow achieved full phenolic ripeness, plenty of the richness of the 2018 style, but also admirably ‘low’ alcohol at ‘only’ 13.75%. The Margaux commune was a bit patchy and it was Ferrière that stole my heart there. But the best address – as is so often the case – seemed to be in the high-Cabernet proportion gravelly communes of the northern Médoc. Mouton often excels in the more fun-packed vintages, and 2018 is no exception. Léoville-Las Cases absolutely nailed it this year. 

Of course, buying en primeur is also about laying down your money long before you’ll take delivery of the wine, and long long before you’ll consider drinking any. It’s therefore for the most part an economic decision. For that side of things I recommend you read what’s on offer at Liv-ex.com. But also look at current market prices for the wine you are considering in back vintages of comparable quality, and ask yourself - is the discount for 2018 high enough to justify paying right now?

But there are also more sentimental reasons to buy en primeur – such as the birth of a son or daughter, or if you got married for instance. In this case the best of 2018 is an additional blessing because those that are balanced are also for sure going to have the fruit stuffing and tannins to be long-keepers – ideal for celebrations in the decades to come. This will be a vintage to buy large formats and then write them into your will!

CAVEATS TO THIS WHOLE EN PRIMEUR TASTING EXERCISE

There’s an argument to be made that tasting a wine from barrel and trying to pinpoint its quality – especially numerically – is like interviewing a toddler for a future post-graduate scholarship. We buy these wines because we want the pleasure they will give when mature, but we buy them as infants. It’s an exercise in extreme telescoping. Wine goes through more rapid change during its elevage in cask than it ever will during any 18-month period in bottle.

En primeur samples are – in theory – ‘representative’ of the final blend that will be bottled in 2020. A sample is drawn from a variety of casks – some new, some used, different plots, varieties, to approximate what the final bottled blend will be. It’s unfinished wine. It is also more temperamental and fragile than a sample from a bottle of finished wine. Sometimes a sample can lose its lustre – especially those made up in a batch a few days prior.

Where I tasted the same wine in two different occasions I have included both tasting notes in this report.

A NOTE OF CAUTION

When we taste en primeur we are tasting wine that has been made, but not finished. It still has many months still to evolve in cask, before bottling. Blends are made up by châteaux and put into bottle especially for the trade and journalists to taste. At some châteaux the final blend is already made, though selection from different coopers and the right proportion of new and used barrels drawn to represent the ‘final blend’. At other châteaux the final blend is not yet decided – they will wait to see how each lot, and barrel progresses, so the blend offered is a sort of guestimate. But in either case, the wine can show quite differently from different bottles and at different locations and circumstances. As has been my practice each year, when I have tasted a wine more than once I include both tasting notes and scores. Usually they are not too far apart, but sometimes they can be. But I would prefer you to see that than to pretend that an individual tasting note of an infant wine is more definitive than the author can ever hope it to be.