The Wine Press: Age has its merits, but not all young Bordeauxs age well

My wife finds wine people annoying. Apparently she has made an exception for the man with whom she shares a roof. We brag too much, she says, and we argue over silly issues like which is better, 2009 or 2010 Bordeaux?

I feel her pain, as a certain president used to say.

But we wine people can’t help ourselves: Both 2009 and 2010 are remarkable Bordeaux vintages, wines that will likely age gracefully for years, if not decades. It’s fun to argue about greatness, elegance vs. power, that sort of effluvium. But greatness doesn’t come along so often.

More typical are vintages like 2011 or 2013, when weather created messy, ugly harvests that produced wines to be questioned by wine geeks, if not simply dismissed.

Two years ago I made nice with the 2011 vintage, finding some good hunters among a pack of three-legged dogs. But after retasting 72 bottles of 2011s last month and tasting about 80 bottles of 2013 wines as well, it was hard to muster enthusiasm, particularly for the red wines.

Rainy, difficult weather makes for skinny reds, but white wines are less compromised in both 2011 and 2013. Domaine de Chevalier is always a star. Fieuzal, Larrivet Haut Brion, Malartic Lagraviere, Olivier, Pape Clement and Smith Haut Lafitte are tasty dry 2013 white wines.

Across the board, the red wines are less tasty and often too expensive. The price escalations wrought by the successes of 2009 and 2010 have lingered over the past five years. Among the 2011s, Leoville Barton, Montrose and Leoville Las Cases are excellent wines, but they cost $75, $120 and $150, respectively. And at those prices, they’d better be excellent.

There were more wines of character and class among the 2013s, which is quite the opposite of what I was told to expect. The prices are less aggressive, and the quality more consistent. 2011 includes some wines that are better and some that are worse than 2013’s standard fare. 2013 offers fewer successes but fewer failures as well.

It’s hard not to conclude that 2011 suffered from lofty ambitions inspired by the two great vintages that preceded it. In 2013, producers knew they were challenged and didn’t try to make the wines into something more than nature was willing to provide.

It’s also encouraging that the least expensive among the well-known chateaux performed well in both vintages: Camensac, Chasse Spleen, Citran, Fourcas Hosten, Lamarque, La Tour Carnet and La Tour de By offered balance in 2013. Cantemerle and La Lagune showed well in both 2011 and 2013.

Both 2011 and 2013 offer excellent sweet whites, because Bordeaux’s dessert wines rely on humidity-dependent cinerea botrytis, a mold that concentrates sugar in the grapes, adding richness and character. Climens, Coutet, Guiraud and d’Yquem are lovely in 2011. Suduiraut and La Tour Blanche are only a few steps behind. Each of these is even more exciting in 2013.

I’m sure all this reads as faint praise. But the great virtue of Bordeaux is its ability to age into something more than it is when young. Finding vintages that are most likely to age well (like 2009 and 2010) is the stuff of minutiae, so my wife’s view is that few care enough to read about it, much less spend precious social time haggling over it.

She’s probably right. But if you’ve read this far, you must be one of us geeks, and I wouldn’t ignore all the 2011s and 2013s.

Just most of them.

This story was originally published April 12, 2016 at 3:00 AM with the headline "The Wine Press: Age has its merits, but not all young Bordeauxs age well."