Bordeaux 2023: Sweet Smell of Success

To round up my overview of the wines from the Bordeaux 2023 en-primeur vintage I still need to consider the wines of the Graves region.

Principally these wines can be divided into the red wines of Pessac-Léognan and Graves, the white wines from these regions (and a few other dry-white Bordeauxs) and the sweet wines from the Sauternes and Barsac regions.

Pessac-Léognan

In Pessac-Léognan the red wines showed amazing vitality.

I have already mentioned Château Haut-Brion when addressing the wines of the Médoc as it made sense to consider it alongside the other first growths. Just to reprise – Haut Brion was a big rich wine with ripeness concentration and structure that still needs to come into balance and achieve harmony. In contrast, its sister estate Château La Mission Haut-Brion made a more tightly focused wine with superb balance, elegance, restraint and harmony, with a precise fine, but dense structure. 

Other equally great wines from Pessac-Léognan included a lifted and elegant red from Château Smith Haut Lafitte, whose fine, cedary structure was decorated with fabulous lifted, red-fruit perfumes. Château Haut-Bailly produced a wine that was an incredibly pure example of the flavors to be expected from Haut-Bailly, but with great richness and concentration and yet with wonderful balance – a truly exceptional wine. Close behind these three wines was a stellar effort from Domaine de Chevalier, a wine with exceptional red-fruit freshness, excellent density and lovely fresh vivacity.

Dry whites

For the dry whites from Pessac-Léognan, two well-known names again top the rankings with a tense, nervous, mineral fresh, pure and lively wine from Smith Haut Lafitte and a rounder, richer and fuller, yet still incredibly lively wine from Domaine de Chevalier.

Those wines whose blends were more heavily Semillon based were richer and less vivacious than their Sauvignon Blanc-dominated counterparts, so for this reason I found the whites from Haut-Brion and La Mission Haut-Brion were less compelling. They have depth, concentration and complexity so may well evolve spectacularly, but they seem slow out of the blocks by comparison with Smith Haut Lafitte Blanc's nervosity and freshness. White wines of note from the Médoc were a citric-fresh and mineral-pure Pavillon Blanc from Château Margaux and an outstandingly ripe, rounded, leesy, concentrated and tropical Caillou Blanc from Chateau Talbot.

Many good estates made wines that exceeded the level of quality they usually produce. Four excellent examples of this were Château de Fieuzal, whose wine had a wonderful concentration; Château Olivier, with its mineral preciseness and wonderfully fresh crispness; and then both Château La Louvière and Château de France, which produced fresh lively elegant wines of great vivacity.

For me, however, possibly the best-value wine I tasted in Bordeaux this year was the wonderfully fresh, concentrated, elegant and sophisticated Cuvée Caroline blanc from Château Chantegrive in the Graves. Chantegrive is an estate whose whites and reds have both demonstrated incredible value for money in the past few years. This is a wine that shows all the quality of a top Pessac-Léognan white at half the price of most such wines.

Sweet whites

It is fitting that the year in Which Alexandre de Lur Saluces passed saw Château de Fargues produce a wine of magnificent proportions with incredible depth and concentration of flavor that stood head and shoulders above the line-up of many other superb Sauternes and Barsacs (Château d'Yquem was not tasted as they no longer release en-primeur). De Fargues was followed by Barsac's serial over-performer, the wonderfully pure and bright Château Doisy-Daëne.

The two wines from Sauterne and Barsac that were for me the closest to demonstrating a balance between sweetness and acidity were Château Rieussec and Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey. The light to medium bodied Rieussec had a limey freshness that did a good job of countering its intense sweetness, leaving freshness on the finish. Lafaurie-Peyraguay, by contrast, was rich and honeyed with complex botrytis flavors and a marzipan texture, before finishing with freshness thanks to balancing acidity.

Two other wines that really stood out were a powerful, concentrated and honeyed Château Suduiraut and a truly delicious Château Climens that showed rich apricot fruit, piquant orange notes and attractive freshness.

Many Sauternes and Barsac properties produced excellent wines in 2023, and other sweet wines of note were Château Coutet, Château Lamothe Guignard, Château La Tour Blanche, Château de Rayne Vigneau and Château Sigalas Rabaud.

There are very few wines from the 2023 vintage that I think consumers would regret buying for quality reasons. While these may not be wines people should consider buying for investment – as they may lack the concentration for very long aging – they will provide lovely drinking in the short to medium term. The reds are fresh, elegant, perfumed and approachable. Their acidity and fine structure should allow them to age and their freshness should make them appealing at most stages in their development. There are attractive and lively dry whites and stupendously rich and concentrated sweet wines.

The key to buying the 2023s will be price – ideally look for wines that are released 20-30 percent below the prices of the same estate's 2022s. It is important that producers are not distracted from cutting prices by higher-than-expected scores. This was an abundant vintage and the large estates seem likely to have volumes of stock available in two years' time.

So, while it is easy to argue that many of these wines offer compelling drinking, purchasers should be careful not to over-pay at his stage.

My tasting notes can be found under the 2023 vintage of the wines concerned on the find page of the Wine-Searcher website. Click the relevant links above for more information about the wines and the review page to see critics scores and notes as they come in.