Bordeaux 2012: ‘a small, cunning, cowering, timorous vintage made by the skin of its teeth’
What was it Robert Burns said about a mouse? “Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!” The words just popped into my head as I was considering the 2012 vintage presented to trade and media in Bordeaux last week. For this is very far from a bombastic vintage swaggering about, demonstrating its obvious qualities as 2009 and 2010 did. This is indeed a small, cunning, cowering, timorous vintage made, when truly successful (as it is only in a minority of cases), by the skin of its teeth and with huge effort and cost in the vineyard and cellar. As for the panic, there is certainly a distinct air of it about the process of selling these wines, particularly after a dismal 2011 en primeur campaign. In the current economic situation, and with China much less enthusiastic, who will buy them? And, crucially, when?
The superficial shorthand for the 2012 vintage is that it is a Merlot year because the whole season was so late that the ripening of Cabernet Sauvignon was severely compromised. But it is perhaps more accurate to say that growers were presented with so many challenges during the growing season that success can be measured only on a case-by-case basis, depending on exactly how each property reacted. The top properties, so flush with the cash generated by the 2009 and 2010 primeurs sales that whole new wineries have been or are being built at Châteaux Cheval Blanc, Mouton, Palmer, Margaux, Le Pin and Petrus, can nowadays afford to make some great wine every year. It’s just a question of deploying enough people in the vineyard to treat the vines to what they call toilettage, or snipping off excess crop (vital for Cabernets, particularly young Cabernets, in 2012), and of putting only the very finest lots of wine into the grand vin.