Yao_C
July 20, 2021, 8:28pm
40
IIRC particularly elevated alcohol levels for right bank Bordeaux, which can be a problem if you’re sensitive to it. In fact, here is John Gilman on the topic of 2010 right bank. He doesn’t mince words:
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I have little (read that as absolutely zero) hope that the 2010s on the Right Bank are going to age well, as I have found them patently unbalanced from day one in barrel and fully expect them to unravel and implode with bottle age. There are exceptions that are passably well-made in the face of very daunting challenges, but in general terms, the wines are too high in alcohol, overripe in aromatic and flavor profiles and have aggressive, green and unripe acidity that will never fully integrate in the wines over time. The lack of ripeness in the acids is readily recognizable to those of us who taste a lot of young German wines, but interestingly, almost none of the journalists I saw in the spring of 2011 in Bordeaux regularly taste German wines at all and had no clue what I was talking about when I discussed the lack of ripeness of the acids in the 2010 clarets. There are a few journalists from Germany and Switzerland that I see there every year that have a good background on German wines, but very few others at the annual En Primeur events, so you are talking about folks who really do not have much experience evaluating acids in young wines.
Then you have the question of tannins in the 2010s as well- the highest measured tannin levels in the history of Bordeaux mind you- and the Bordelais had to leave the grapes hanging out on the vines until the sugars reached dizzying levels in the hopes of getting the tannins to ripen up a bit. Whether they had sufficient time to really ripen the tannins remains to be seen, as I tasted an awful lot of wines that had a distinctly green edge of astringency to their (skin and seed) tannins, and which many tasters missed because of the enormous amount of youthful fruit in so many of the 2010s. What will be the place of those tannins in the wines down the road when the bloom of youthful fruit backs off a bit is an open question- they may dominate the wines. And mind, we are only talking about grape-derived tannins and not all the additional oak tannins lathered on the 2010s by those with a penchant for new wood. The tannins leech out of the new oak faster at higher alcohol levels, and the 2010s did yoeman’s work of adding wood tannins to their already copious amounts of skin and seed tannins in this vintage, so there are a very large number of astringent Right Bank wines out there from 2010. Many continue to hide their structural imbalances behind the fat fruit of the vintage, but how long will that last? As I said, there are a couple of handfuls of 2010s on the Right Bank that somehow managed to sidestep many of the potential pitfalls of the vintage, but it is certainly not even a significant majority of the 2010 Right Bank wines out there and it is a vintage fraught with peril today and only destined to get worse as time goes by- IMHO of course. Youthful fruit in wines, like youthful beauty, does not last the whole ride and I am not sure there is enough inner beauty in a great many of these 2010s to make them anything but great mistakes in the cellar twenty years from now.