A Few Reflections
on Grapes,
 Wine-making,
Wine-Aging,
And
Vintages...

Merlot is an early-flowering grape variety of which we strive, in Bordeaux, to slow down the maturity.  It can present heavy (“cooked”) flavors on a warm soil, but it will show extraordinary fruit on a cool terroir, where it will mature very slowly. 

  In our region, where Merlot can find a cool, fresh soil (clay/limestone) and be harvested very ripe, it presents the following paradox: the tannins are evolved and not harsh on the palate, they preserve the structure of the wine... through their aromatic expression! Where is the paradox? In the fact that the coolness of the soil, which induces a long vegetative cycle, allows at the same time the preservation of fresh red fruit (hence the elegance). 

  At the top of this paradox, the grape will develop the most moving and extraordinary expressions: intensity and freshness of the aromas, delicate and exquisite silky flavors, no harshness.  It can give young and dazzling wines with silky tannins but it can also age beautifully for decades.  

  To make a great wine, everything starts with the maturity of the grape.  The exceptional bottles are always rare because they require a dangerous harvesting date, when the fruit at the summit of its opulence also reaches a state of extreme fragility.  So here is the challenge: opulence, fragility and ... freshness!  If the perfect maturity is not reached, the color will be slightly bluish (ink) and you then talk of “powerful wines”, “ferocious tannins”, that will need a lot of aging and will never be amazing. 

  One important consideration about vintage. When you pay great care and attention to all of the above, you do not make a poor vintage (except on very rare and catastrophic years!). Rather the different vintages will display a diversity of interesting characters, some showing more discrete elegance, a little nostalgia perhaps, some more subtlety in the expression and some like the 2005 with abundance of power!  2005 is like Beethoven’s 9th symphony.  But isn’t the Pastoral (6th) delightfully exquisite also? 

  To deny the beauty of vintages like 2004 and 2003 is like saying: only Beethoven’s 9th is music worth listening to.  We shouldn’t commit this huge mistake...