Confounding the Forecasts for Bordeaux 2011(1)--http://www.cnwinenews.com

BORDEAUX — As anyone who spent 2011 in France surely remembers, it was a year when the natural order of the seasons was scrambled.

Summer started in March and continued into May. Temperatures soared past 30 degrees; barely a drop of rain fell. As the sun beat down on French vineyards, the grapes began to suffer. Then, in July, the fall mists came and stayed, slowing the development of a precocious crop. Finally, as the calendar showed autumn nearing, spring arrived, just in time for the harvest.

The bizarre seasonal pattern challenged vignerons and sowed confusion in the wine trade. Usually, critics taste a vintage before grading it; with 2011 Bordeaux, it was the other way around. Long before anyone had sampled the wines, a consensus was reached that 2011 was going to be forgettable.

There was a bit of wishful thinking in this. Bordeaux prices have soared over the past decade, pushed higher by demand from buyers in China and by the hoopla surrounding vintages like 2005, 2009 and 2010. Still, the 2010s, despite their quality, have been a tough sell.

2011 was supposed to be the pause that refreshes the Bordeaux market, highlighting the quality of the previous vintages while offering a lower-priced alternative. Yet nature has a way of confounding forecasts, and the vintage has turned out to be more interesting than it had any right to be. Unusually, it is a year when the white wines, an often overlooked minority of the Bordeaux production, have stolen the spotlight from the reds.

I traveled to Bordeaux last week for the so-called en primeur tastings, when chateaus provide their first look at the latest vintage. These sessions serve as the springboard for a campaign to sell futures on the wines, most of which will not be bottled until next year.

At this nascent stage, it is difficult to assess the potential of Bordeaux, which is meant to age for many years. Still, the judgments made during en primeur week — or, in the case of 2011, even earlier — have a way of sticking with a vintage throughout its long life, irregardless of how it evolves.

The labels that have been slapped on the past decade of Bordeaux vintages might read something like this:

2003: Heatwave vintage that sharpened the trans-Atlantic divide. British critics’ view: Clumsy, oafish, made-for-America disgrace. American critics’ view: If you can’t stand the heat, step away from the spittoon.

In some cases, these kinds of generalizations are justified. Last spring, at a tasting of 2010 Bordeaux, I stopped taking notes after a few dozen wines — they were so consistently good that it seemed pointless.

In other cases, a vintage is more complicated. I’ve recently tasted several Bordeaux from the supposedly inferior 2007 vintage — Château Canon from Saint-Emilion, and Château Haut-Bailly from Pessac-Léognan — that are drinking beautifully right now. And while 2005 is clearly a great vintage, if you opened any of its grander bottles now, rather than waiting 10 years, you might not think so. Indeed, you’d probably want to shave your tongue.

2011 is especially difficult to sum up. It is a vintage for careful note-taking, with some very good wines and quite a few disappointments.

Clearly, it is no 2010, 2009 or 2005. But then, how many vintages of the century can one region produce in a single decade? (At the current rate, there shouldn’t be another one until 2300 or so. Somehow, I don’t think the Bordeaux marketing machine will let us wait until then.)

Let’s start with the 2011 reds, which make up the bulk of Bordeaux production. In general, those from the Left Bank of the Gironde River, where cabernet sauvignon is the major grape variety, impressed me more than those from the Right Bank, where merlot dominates.