Winophilia

The previously moribund Bordeaux market has been perked up by considerable early hype over the 2009 vintage.  These wines will shortly be offered as futures purchases to consumers willing to invest their cash in selected items two years in advance of their arrival in the marketplace.  At the moment, though, it is the 2007 clarets that are now landing on retail shelves.  I’ve been tasting these wines in depth in recent weeks and will provide full tasting notes on the most successful 2007s in the next issue of the International Wine Cellar, which will also include an in-depth early report on the 2009s.

I thought I’d give claret lovers an overview of the 2007 vintage by turning to Jeffrey Davies (Signature Selections), an American expat who has been a French wine merchant based in Bordeaux since the early 1980s.  Davies has a long track record for seeking out passionate, quality-conscious small producers and helping them bring their wines to market—including dozens of Bordeaux châteaux, often from less-renowned appellations, as well as numerous domains in the Languedoc and southern Rhône Valley. 

I began by asking Davies to briefly describe the 2007 growing season, which began with one of the earliest bud-breaks ever, and an unprecedented heat wave in April, but then witnessed a mostly dismal summer.

Jeffrey Davies:  We had a cool and rainy summer, and we were very concerned that the vintage would be a washout.  But then, as if by miracle, we had a great Indian summer:  a warm and bright September, with favorable weather running well into October.  For the people who waited and harvested later, it gave the grapes a chance to pick up some more phenolic ripeness, to absorb and then burn off some of the excess water.  All of the serious chateau owners had done a lot of work during the summer, spraying against mildew and pulling leaves off the vines in order to get better air circulation and more direct sunlight onto the grapes.

At the time of the harvest, most estates were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the grapes and the initial musts.

Stephen Tanzer:  Were the smaller producers penalized by not have the financial wherewithal to make multiple passes through the vineyards to spray against mildew and reduce crop levels, or did their smaller scale offer them an advantage over the larger estates?

JD:  That’s a good question.  Clearly those estates with deep pockets had the resources with which to do all the necessary steps.  But at the same time, I recall from my early tastings that we were all pretty much uniformly surprised by the quality of the value wines that were produced by smaller properties on the Right Bank.  The little guys could really get out there and physically take care of their vineyards with one or two family members or employees.  And they realize that an obsession with quality is the only way they can survive in the current economic environment.

ST:  What were the key decisions as to picking dates?  It seems as if some estates were forced by incipient rot to pick early, but others could let the fruit hang.

JD:  Given the systems we now have for harvesting, and the sorting tables that are now used nearly everywhere, and assuming the chateaux did the sprayings when they were necessary, we can now take the risk of waiting later for phenolic ripeness, even at the risk of getting some grey rot, because we can get rid of underripe and rotten grapes and only put the ripe, healthy grapes into the tanks.  That’s been the biggest positive change in Bordeaux in the last 15 years:  the knowledge that you don’t have to rush to harvest simply because of the risk of grey rot.  Twenty-five years ago, we never could have made the wines we made in 2007.

ST:  Why do relatively few 2007 wines show the intensity and complexity of flavor you’d expect when the season lasted an unusually long 130 days between flowering and harvest.

JD:  If you experienced that in certain wines, I would think it was due to a certain level of dilution. Or if people were unwilling to take any risk, and brought in their fruit before it was ripe enough.  But there are plenty of wines that have charming and relatively complex aromatics.

I doubt that anyone can honestly pretend that this is a profound, long-aging vintage.  But over the last 15 years I don’t think the serious Bordeaux producers, large or small, have produced any vintage that can be described as catastrophic.  Nothing that comes close to reminding us of the astoundingly horrible vintages of the past, like 1968 or 1972 or 1977.  Even some of the 2002s now, such as those from Canon-Fronsac, have picked up some delicious truffley qualities.  Every wine doesn’t need to be a blockbuster if it offers aromatic charm and complexity on the palate.

ST:  You live in Bordeaux.  Did you notice some particularly difficult spots during the growing season—or, on the other hand, some especially successful areas?

JD:  I don’t think it’s a vintage that’s as regionally specific as some could be.  It’s more of a wine grower’s vintage, in which those who carried out the necessary steps in the vineyard did the best job.  So it was not at all like a vintage such as 2003, where the Pomerol plateau was hit especially hard by heat and drought in August.  I wouldn’t even necessarily draw a big difference between Left and Right Bank.  With one caveat, though:  since merlot generally ripens earlier, you probably had a better shot at getting your merlot ripe than your cabernet sauvignon.

I think we’ll see some very successful wines from the clay and limestone soils—from Fronsac, for example—but also from some of the gravelly soils in the southern Médoc, which dried quickly and allowed the grapes to get very ripe.

ST:  What were the choices when it came to vinification, and which method was most likely to succeed?

JD:  Again, I think it started in the vineyards.  You harvested for optimal ripeness, then did a careful sorting, then moved the fruit as gingerly as possible into the tanks.  It was probably a good vintage in which to do some whole-berry fermentation because this makes for a slower and more gentle extraction.  [Consulting winemaker] Stéphane Derenoncourt is certainly one of the leading advocates of whole berry-fermentation.  You don’t extract as much from the pips as you would when you crush the fruit.  Some saignée [“bleeding” of the must to eliminate a percentage of water] on healthy berries could help to produce more concentrated wines.  But of course concentration, no matter what technique you use, only works if the fruit is ripe and healthy in the first place.  Otherwise you simply concentrate the bad elements.

ST:  I couldn’t help noticing that there were numerous Right Bank wines, many of them from lesser appellations, that showed more texture, ripeness and sweetness of fruit than many classified growths of the Médoc, or even than some of the highest-ranking Saint-Emilions.  How did they manage that?

JD:  After having tasted through about a hundred fifty 2007s a month ago, and seeing a very wide range of wines side by side, one of our conclusions was just that:  ironically, a number of smaller producers on the Right Bank did a very good job.  Again, probably because their vineyards are small enough so that they can care for them almost like a garden.  They harvested accurately, treated their fruit gently, and did not overly extract, or “make,” the wines.  They handled them gently in barrel, often using less new oak than in some recent vintages.  They may be more flexible than larger estates in the Médoc.  No one had illusions about making wines for their grandchildren.  But what’s wrong with making charming wines to enjoy over the next 5 to 10 years?

ST:  What’s your advice to buyers?  Given that this is probably the least important vintage of the last five from the point of view of structure and potential longevity, and that prices for Bordeaux are so high today, is there any reason why American wine lovers should buy 2007s?

JD:  Anyone who enjoys drinking wine, rather than just collecting it, should be watching the market for ’07s.  Most négociants are dropping prices to the point where they will once again become reasonable.  People should be drinking the 2007s while they wait for their  ’05s, ’08s, ’09s, even their 2000s, to mature.  It would be a real disaster if retailers said, with accuracy, “this is a vintage you’ll want to drink over the next several years,” and then buyers were scared away because they think Bordeaux has to last for decades.

The real problem with the vintage has little to do with its intrinsic quality.  The problem is that it’s a vintage that was initially overpriced, just like the 1997s were.  In Bordeaux, we really needed to bring down prices more for the 2006s and then the 2007s, and then raise them for the 2008s.  But we got it all wrong.  In fact, we ended up having to lower prices for the 2008s in order to have any chance of selling them, even though it was a better vintage.

The 2007s are delicious, pleasant wines to enjoy with meals and with friends, and ideal for restaurants.  It’s just a question of getting them at reasonable prices.  And ultimately Americans will find these wines at reasonable prices.