There’s enthusiasm for warm climate Bordeaux as wine cognoscenti are shocked to realise equating a cool climate with quality is nonsense. A hot 2022 growing season produced wines of high quality and amazing freshness.
The esteemed wine writer and author Jancis Robinson, just back from tastings at this year’s en primeur campaign, wrote that the most common word to describe these embryonic 2022s was ‘Surprising’.
Last summer in France, especially in the south-west, was scorching with temperatures way above average throughout the growing season. Serious wildfires broke out in the Bordeaux region. And, even more testing for vignerons, there was a serious drought with no rain whatsoever from the beginning of July until late August and rainfall totals seriously below average every month except June. One would expect the wines that resulted from these sub-Saharan conditions to taste soupy and as broiled as the surfers in Arcachon, Bordeaux-by-the-Atlantic, were last summer.
Jancis, methinks, had not spent enough time in the Barossa to get rid of her prejudice against wines made from grapes grown in warm climates. Perhaps she will now stop scoffing at supporters of Robert Parker who did not fall for the “only cool climates can produce great wines” nonsense. The Wine Advocate he founded, incidentally, gave three 2022 Bordeaux wines its top score of 99-100—Château Canon, Les Carmes Haut-Brion, and Montrose.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the independent French critic Jean-Marc Quarin was similarly surprised by the 2022s gushing about them in his en primeur report. “This vintage surpasses all known points of reference,” Quarin wrote. “There is no obvious logical or scientific explanation for this level of quality, and many winemakers have been humble enough to hold up their hands and admit that they are stumped.” In his view, “80% of the wines I have tasted are the best the estates have ever made.”
