Bordeaux Stands Firm

The ups and downs of the 2020 vintage continue a trend of extreme growing conditions and mixed results

- BY JAMES MOLESWORTH

Throughout the 2020 vintage, France’s most prominent wine region dealt with the types of extreme weather conditions that have become commonplace in recent years. After a very wet spring that showed touches of frost and hail along the way, a warm and excessively dry summer led to one of the earliest harvests of the past 20 years. Heavy rains in August broke the drought, but the downpours were of varying intensity around the region, resulting in heterogenous veraison and ripening depending on the location and terroir.

The spring was perhaps the most difficult time, with the heavy rains leading to extra work in the vineyards (particularly early on and even more so for producers who work organically) and the onset of the pandemic causing logistical issues. But despite the range of challenges, Bordeaux produced another outstanding, albeit inconsistent, vintage. Though the 2020s are more variable than the flamboyant 2018s and well-defined 2019s, the vintage delivers a number of compelling wines, earning a rating of 93 points on the Left Bank and 92 points on the Right Bank.

Over a period of several weeks this winter, I blind-tasted nearly 350 Bordeaux wines in our New York office, nearly three-quarters of them reds, with the remainder mainly dry whites plus a handful of dessert wines. At the top of the pack, 24 bottlings earn classic ratings of 95 points or higher on the Wine Spectator 100-point scale, while another 121 achieve outstanding scores of 90-plus. While the Bordelais hyped the new vintage as they do seemingly every year, 2020 is far from a buy-across-the-board vintage. Instead, it was a year when Bordeaux’s top