2024 brought extremely challenging conditions to the vineyards of Bordeaux. In spring, rain and cool temperatures disrupted flowering, and mildew ran rampant in the vineyards. After a glorious, season-saving summer, rains returned in September to threaten the harvest. Thirty years ago, such a vintage might have been a write-off, but winemaking has come a long way since then. Winemakers who held their nerve, made the right decisions, put in the hours in the vineyards and then correctly sorted their fruit were able to make beautiful wines. Last week in Bordeaux, Uncorked tasted elegant, expressive, delicious wines that will comfortably stand the test of time.
Many Bordeaux 2024s are fresh, balanced wines that evoke the best of yesteryear. They are lithe rather than muscular. They are not overripe, densely concentrated or highly alcoholic. They have plenty of tension. They are lovely expressions of terroir. They will age well, but won’t take twenty years to be drinkable. They will be a very rewarding addition to any cellar.
The season
Winter 2023/2024 was mild, and very rainy. It was the wettest start to a growing season since the 2000 vintage; between October 2023 and March 2024 double the usual amount of rain for that six-month window fell. That meant that going into the growing season, soils were waterlogged, with big implications for what was to follow. Mild temperatures through February and March allowed the growing season to get going quickly, and budbreak took place in March a week earlier than average. April largely swerved frost problems, but from mid-April to mid-July temperatures stayed below the seasonal averages. Late April also saw the first symptoms of what was to be the season’s bugbear, downy mildew. With waterlogged soils and cool, cloudy conditions, mildew soon ran rife, threatening the crop and leaving vineyard managers racing to keep up. In the battle against mildew, well-drained, well-ventilated terroirs fared better; so for instance, vines planted on gravel soils in the Médoc adjacent to the estuary, where wind has a freer hand, managed better than sheltered vines on water-retentive clay soils. Mildew was a constant menace till drier conditions arrived in July.
The cool conditions had put a brake on the season’s early start, with flowering starting from mid-May on the right bank, and the end of May in the Médoc and the Graves. Flowering was drawn-out, and not fully complete in the Médoc until the end of June. The cool, damp conditions also meant high incidences of coulure (a.k.a. shatter, when flowers fail to develop into grapes) and millerandage (a mix of underdeveloped and normal-sized grapes on the same bunch), ultimately impacting on yields.
Summer saved the season. July and August were hot and dry. There was a period of 47 continuous days when most of the region saw no rain at all. These conditions finally beat back the waves of mildew and allowed grapes to ripen. A few vineyards even began to show signs of hydric stress. Veraison (when grapes change colour, from green to either yellow or red) mostly took place around mid-August.
‘Without the rainy September, we would have had an amazing vintage,’ said Aymeric de Gironde at Troplong Mondot. But intermittent rains returned in September, challenging the harvest period. It was a particular problem for Merlot, which ripens earlier than the Cabernets. On the warmest terroirs of St-Émilion and Pomerol, some winemakers got their ripest grapes in before the first rains. With cooler conditions now slowing ripening, many winemakers held fire and waited for drier conditions to return, rather than risk bringing in swollen, dilute berries. On the left bank, the Merlot harvest took place between the heaviest rains. By the time the Cabernet harvest rolled round, in the first half of October, the September rains had passed. In a vintage when it had been cool for much of the year, there was little danger of overripe fruit and many winemakers on both banks held off harvest as long as they could, in the interest of maximising phenolic (flavour) ripeness. They had to balance that against botrytis (rot) entering vineyards in October, with the concomitant risk of losing more fruit.
Sort sort sort
Sorting (and then discarding under-par fruit) was key to making good wine in 2024 Bordeaux. The representatives of many chateaux told us they had sorted more aggressively than ever before, which is presumably why we tasted so many outstanding wines in a vintage that reads as tricky on paper.
At Feytit-Clinet, Jeremy Chasseuil told us he had more people sorting (14) than harvesting (12). Grapes arriving at winery doors passed through several layers of sorting. Traditional manual sorting involves people standing at a table of grapes picking out under-par fruit. Then fruit will have to pass modern optical sorting machines. Destemmers can sort grapes for size (and reject the grapes that aren’t big enough, which will probably be underripe).
This vintage, many chateaux also inaugurated densitometer sorting machines. In a vintage like 2024, one danger is grapes which look black, as if they are fully ripe, but which in fact are still slightly underripe. If they slip through the sorting process, they can import underripe (‘green’) flavours. Optical sorting machines won’t pick these grapes out, but densitometers can. The grapes are put into a cool sugar-solution water bath. The amount of sugar is measured precisely to correspond to a potential ripeness threshold for the grapes (say, 11% potential alcohol). Grapes that match that level or are riper sink; grapes that do not reach that level of ripeness float. The floating grapes do not go to the fermentation vat. The grapes that sank are removed and gently air-dried before they are allowed to proceed.
After the sort...
Everyone seems to have breathed a big sigh of relief after the sorting process was over. ‘The big job was done,’ as Emmeline Borie told us at Grand-Puy-Lacoste. Nobody complained about difficulties with fermentations or vinifications.
Alcohol for an era of moderation
Alcohol levels are moderate in 2024. On the left bank, they typically fall between 12-13%, and are almost never over 13.5% on the right bank. And most wineries needed to chaptalize at least some vats to achieve these alcohol levels. Chaptalization involves adding sugar to unfermented grape must in order to increase the alcohol content after fermentation. It used to happen every single vintage, but in the modern era of global warming and higher average temperatures it has become much less significant. In the last decade, it has only been widely used in Bordeaux in the cooler vintages of 2017 and 2021. Rather than chaptalize, a few wineries used saignée to increase sugar levels: that involves bleeding off a proportion of juice from a tank of crushed red grapes, increasing the ratio of skins to juice, and so making a richer wine with more colour and tannin. Some wineries also used reverse osmosis to draw out water from the must before fermentation for a more concentrated must.
I am mildew, fear my name
Downy mildew is a fungal disease that can wreak havoc in vineyards. It is also known as peronspora, and is not to be confused with powdery mildew, another nasty vine affliction. Downy mildew manifests as a cottony growth on vine leaves. Severely affected leaves will drop off, reducing photosynthesis and delaying fruit ripening. Not only will this lead to weak wines with unripe flavours, the knock-on effect will retard vine growth the following season. Like powdery mildew and the phylloxera louse, downy mildew originated in North America and arrived in Europe in the 19th century. (Beware American vines bringing gifts.) The unholy trilogy of downy mildew, powdery mildew (a.k.a. oidium) and phylloxera together devastated European vineyards in the late 19th century, ending viticulture in some areas, making it marginal in many others. These vineyard afflictions have never since left the scene, though winemakers have developed coping strategies. In 2024, downy mildew ran rife in Bordeaux. The intensity of the outbreak was ‘unprecedented in living memory’, according to Nicolas Thienpont at Pavie Macquin.
We’re going to need a bigger boat
Château Biac practises ‘lutte raisonée’. This means that the chateau is organic whenever possible, and minimises the use of chemicals – but allows itself to use them, when strictly necessary. At Biac, Gabriel Asseily told us that at the worst point of the outbreak, the mildew bypassed the leafage and appeared directly on the grapes, which he had never seen before. At that point he decided he had to resort to the ‘weapons cabinet’, and ordered a fungicide he had used to suppress the worst mildew outbreaks in the past. This time, even that was ineffective, and the chateau suffered significant losses. Gabriel reckons he was up against a strain of mildew he hadn’t encountered before.
Certified organic producers have it even worse. The rules of organic viticulture do not allow them to use chemical pesticides, herbicides or fungicides. However, they are allowed to use Bordeaux mixture, the copper sulphate-based mixture developed in the late 19th century as an effective counter to downy mildew. It is sprayed onto vine leaves, and kills any mould spores it comes to contact with. It needs to be re-applied after rain showers, as it will have been washed off. Copper is also bad for soils, and its use is controlled. (You sometimes hear producers argue that modern chemical fungicides are or can be less bad for the environment than copper sulphate, and as a result they make what they consider a principled choice not to be organic). Winemakers in Bordeaux are allowed to use 4kg of copper sulphate per hectare per year, averaged over 7 years. That means that in a badly-afflicted vintage like 2024 they can use more, as long as they can bring that number down in other vintages. But as Adrian Bernard wryly told us at Domaine de Chevalier, ‘if you have 3 vintages like 2021, 2023 and 2024, good luck staying organic.’ (All mildew-afflicted vintages.) On a cool, sheltered terroir susceptible to mildew, in 2024 Domaine de Chevalier faced the prospect of losing their crop if they stuck with copper sulphate and its limits. They stepped back from organic viticulture and resorted to modern chemical fungicides.
Durfort-Vivens has been fully biodynamic since 2016; as with organic producers, biodynamic producers are permitted to spray with copper sulphate. In 2018, another vintage marked by a severe outbreak of (principally downy) mildew, at Durfort Gonzague Lurton suffered the bitter blow of losing 90% of his crop to mildew. So when he considered the cool, damp, overcast conditions of spring 2024, he took no chances, and began spraying hard and early. Over the season he used 6kg of copper per hectare, and returned a reasonable-sized crop of 37 hl/ha (hectolitres per hectare). He will have to bring down his average copper use to comply with the limit over subsequent vintages. Gonzague’s brother Henri quoted us the same figure of 6kg of copper per hectare for his own treatments at Brane-Cantenac.
Adaptations in the vineyard
Fighting mildew isn’t just about spraying; there is a lot a producer can do in the vineyard to mitigate the spread of mildew, or the conditions that encourage it. In the damp Bordeaux climate, cover crops have become normal in many if not most vineyards; rows of grasses and flowers between the vines. These bring benefits in terms of biodiversity and long-term soil health. In a wet year like 2024, cover crops absorb some of the surplus water in the soil. They also hold the soil together, and supply traction on the ground for vineyard tractors and workers. Otherwise, in very muddy conditions, it can become impossible to enter the vineyard, just when you most need to do so. When dry conditions set in, cover crops can compete too much for water with the vines, and have to be cut back. It is standard practice to do that at the start of summer. But in 2024, cover crops were widely left in place for longer than usual.
Canopy management is also a critical tool for fighting mildew. It’s important to have some canopy overhead to shade the grape bunches from the sun in the hottest part of summer. But by thinning or cutting away part of the canopy, you allow more air to circulate, giving mould spores less opportunity to settle. Usually vineyard managers will cut away one side of the canopy, and leave the other in place for shade. At Figeac they told us that in 2024, for the first time ever, they cut away both sides of the canopy. A drawback of that was that when summer did become hot, some grapes then suffered sunburn.
Don’t tell Dad
Most quality-conscious Médoc producers were able to bring home final crop yields in the range of 30-40 hl/ha (hectolitres per hectare), after rigorous sorting had removed below-par fruit. In the context of the vintage, these yields were seen as a success. At Haut-Bages Libéral, Claire Villars-Lurton laughed when she imagined what her father would have replied if she had told him she had been happy to reach her 2024 yields of 32 hl/ha; his reply would have been along the lines of, ‘You should have had 50!’ At Brane-Cantenac, her brother-in-law Henri Lurton made a similar joke. It’s a measure of how far Bordeaux has come in a generation that vignerons now prize quality (which will imply a lower-sized crop in all but the most favourable vintages) over quantity.
Could Henri Lurton and Villars-Lurton have achieved yields of 50 hl/ha in 2024? Potentially, at the expense of quality. In a cool, damp vintage a vine will be able to get fewer grapes to ripeness than in a hotter vintage. It may be obvious at veraison that some bunches are struggling to ripen. It is normal nowadays at this point to have a green harvest, and drop fruit that is struggling to ripen. This also allows the remaining grape bunches to ripen more evenly. Most growers dropped fruit in 2024. And 2024 saw a lot of fruit discarded at the winery door.
A few lucky producers whose terroirs were less mildew-susceptible managed high-quality yields into the 40 hl/ha range. These were from elevated, well-ventilated, well-drained terroirs.
And in other colours
In the cool, fresh conditions of 2024, white wines have excelled. At every level, they are imbued with a fantastic sense of tension and energy. If you are partial to Bordeaux Blanc, don’t miss these.
The last word
2024 Bordeaux is heterogeneous. Not everything is amazing. But great terroirs made great wine. Their ability to make great wine whatever the circumstances is why they came to be considered great terroirs in the first place. So stick with the classics, and you won’t go wrong. In a variable vintage, there is more difference than usual between the first and the second wines at individual chateaux. That said, there are also some fabulous second wines (Dame de Montrose is stunning, and Uncorked’s clear favourite for second wine of the campaign).
It's worth remembering that there are some 6,000 producers in Bordeaux, and the large majority of them do not offer their wines en primeur. The few that do are the qualitative tip of the iceberg. These top performers have the human and financial resources for very strict vineyard management and sorting at the winery door, and these that do have made some very good wine.
Here we go
A few 2024s have appeared already, with more imminent. We expect a fast campaign. The Bordelais are also making encouraging noises about pricing. We tasted many lovely wines on our visit to Bordeaux, and we’ll be delighted to tell you about any of them. We won’t recommend anything we think didn’t make the cut. You’ll be seeing our emails, and we’ll post updates as wines appear on our latest news page.
