En Primeur 2007 - Wine Reviews, Ratings and Scores - Bill Blatch

Bill Blatch - Preliminary Bordeaux 2010 Vintage Report

2010: An embarrassingly good vintage

Back in November, many owners were already quietly confident that their '10 was better than the already legendary '09 but, coming hot on the heels of the hallowed 2009s, they seemed embarrassed to say it too loudly. Today, half of Bordeaux is less timid in assessing '10 as great as, if not greater than '09, whilst the other half is more reserved in such a judgement. But there is one point of total agreement: it is totally different from its predecessor.

Both vintages have enormous concentration and high alcohols. Both have great power and weight. But there the similarities end: The 09s are, superficially anyway, softer wines made from gentle, progressive weather, with gradual concentration coming from perfect summer ripening, followed, continuously and without interruption, by further concentration from a perfect autumn. The year had gone through the gears seamlessly with no jolts.

The '10s on the other hand are robust wines made from more aggressive and extreme conditions and their concentration comes from more extreme dehydration. They are the product of drought, of a more irregular sugar build-up in summer and a sudden reconcentration at the finish. And, most importantly, they get their higher acidities from the cooler August-September minimum temperatures and from the cooler autumn.

Add to all this the 2010's later spring water replenishment, in June as opposed to April, all just a bit too late to get a gradual start to the vegetation, the yo-yo June conditions for the flowering and the consequent need, as in 2000, for the season to catch back up as from July, and a parched dry summer that knocked it back into shape, and the harsher, very robust and strongly tannic style of the '10s begins to be explained.

And what caused such a cold winter, such erratic conditions in early summer and such a hot and dry high summer and autumn? I apologise for this but once again we have to go back to the South-Central Pacific where we left off last year with a mild El Niño system that had unexpectedly developed in June 2009 and had ended up creating a slight wobble in the air flows over the Atlantic, producing Bordeaux's fine regular Bordeaux summer of that year.

This had been an unusual result. Historically, strong El Niños produce cool summers in Europe: The poor Bordeaux summers of 1925-26, 1972-1973, 1987-88 correspond exactly to strong El Niño events; and one of the strongest of all times in 1789 is supposed to have caused the crop failures and bread shortages that sparked off the French Revolution. In 2009, it had not been strong enough to inflict such disastrous weather on the whole of Europe, only the North and East, whilst the South-West was spared.

This El Niño event continued up to June 2010, some say also aggravated by an almost total absence of solar activity (no nice auroras to admire in the Arctic this year), and over the winter it had the effect of displacing the Icelandic low pressure systems further East, which in their turn sucked Arctic air down round them, anti-clockwise, into Europe. Hence the very cold winter.

When, in May-June, it was succeeded by the strongest La Niña since 1973, there was a short period of erratic conditions during the transition, disturbing Bordeaux's month of June. Thereafter, as it got ingrained, its effect rolled eastwards over the American Continent, resulting in exactly the opposite conditions to 2009: a cold and dry South American winter, a miserable Californian summer, heat-waves in the South and East of USA, and finally the warmest ever North Atlantic sea surface temperature, which, when joined by an unusually warm Labrador current descending from the fast melting polar ice cap, strengthened the unsettled summer westerly winds. These came in on a more southerly track than usual, over Ireland, Southern Britain and the Channel, leaving the retreating Azores high pressure system 2 to benefit only the South-West. Northern Europe had a miserable summer, and could hardly believe it when we said in October that, down in Bordeaux, we were parched from drought.