Bordeaux 2025: Quiet successes amid a challenging vintage in Pomerol

Pomerol, the smallest and most clay-dominant of Bordeaux’s great red-wine appellations, turned the 2025 vintage’s challenges into one of its quiet successes.

Its heavy clay soils with the distinctive iron-rich subsoil (crasse de fer) retained more moisture than the gravel-heavy Left Bank communes, allowing the vines to reach full phenolic ripeness without the extreme stress or over-concentration seen elsewhere.

The late-August rains were described as ‘miraculous’ by several growers, refreshing the vines at exactly the right moment and delivering the vintage’s signature freshness and lower alcohols.

The result is classic Pomerol character – plush blue and black fruit, floral lift and velvety textures – but with greater purity, transparency to terroir and a cool, mineral edge.

Eric Monneret, technical director at Château La Pointe, emphasised that, ‘terroir is 50-75% of the result. If you don’t have some clay or limestone then 2025 would have been difficult'.

Many wines sit between the opulence of 2022 and the precision of 2020 or 2016: fragrant, drinkable and structured, yet without the heat or heaviness that can sometimes mask the clay’s natural elegance.

Tiny black marbles

Quality aside, this already small appellation also produced some of the lowest quantities of wine in Bordeaux this vintage.

Yields are capped at 49hl/ha in Pomerol but many estates recorded crops under half that in 2025.

Although some such as Château Clinet (34hl/ha), L’Eglise Clinet (33hl/ha) and Château Clos du Clocher (32hl/ha) were not so hard it was a different story elsewhere.

Château Seraphine recorded 22hl/ha, the smallest harvest ever. Château Lafleur and Petrus just 20hl/ha, while Château Petit Village recorded just 16hl/ha.

The key cause of this was the water deficit at the start of the season, which gave rise to very small berries and therefore very low amounts of juice.

By way of example, a 'normal' Merlot berry at harvest time would weigh between 1.4 to 1.6 g.

Christian Moueix, president of the négociant house Établissements Jean-Pierre Moueix, noted that since they recorded no rain between 22 May and 22 August, this led to tight small clusters and berry weights of 0.8–0.9 g for Merlot (even 0.7 g on some gravel parcels).

Marielle Cazaux director of and noted the 30mm rain on 20 August ‘watered the plants, gave more juice and softer phenolics’.

Small measures of relief

Although extremely dry and frequently very hot, many winemakers noted that the season was less relentlessly hot than in, say, 2022.

And, even in summer, cooler evenings helped maintain levels of freshness and aromatic definition in the final wines.

Juliette Couderc, technical director of Château L’Evangile, noted that the vintage was drier than 2022 but benefited from cooler evenings, resulting in ‘less density than 2022’ and the need to be careful with tannins.

‘In 2022 we had 22 days of heatwaves, in 2025 we had eight or nine and we had cooler evenings in 2025,' he said.

Ronan Laborde, owner and winemaker at Château Clinet, agreed, saying that despite, ‘six days in the summer above 40°C , the nights were barely above 20°C and the 35mm rain on 20 August ‘changed the landscape’.

Extraordinary measures

Nonetheless, teams sometimes used various and novel ways to beat the heat when the mercury rose. For example, at Château La Conseillante they applied zinc oxide to protect against harmful UVA and UVB rays during the 10–16 August heatwave.

At Société Agricole de Lafleur, water stress became critical. Rather than traditional irrigation, the team performed what it calls ‘soil water correction’ on only the highest-need plots – less than one-fifth of the vineyard surface.

They repurposed an old harvest machine to open the soil in the middle of the rows, delivered a minimal 10 litres per square metre directly into the ground (15 cm deep), then covered it again.

‘No water to the vines directly,’ Techincal Director Omri Ram explained. ‘Just the minimum necessary to keep the soils alive.’

No correction was applied at Grand Village or Les Perrières; only selected parts of Lafleur received it.

At other times, natural methods proved they still worked perfectly well too. Marie-Laure Latorre, new general manager at Château de Sales (previously at Château Jean Faure), reported ‘no problem with drought’ thanks to deep roots penetrating 2–3 metres in the clay-rich, water-retaining soils.

Harvests were early – very early at times. Château Lafleur experienced its earliest ever harvest starting with the whites on 19 August and reds on 26 August.

Noëmie Durantou Reihac, winemaker of the Durantou estates including L’Eglise Clinet, described 2025 as a ‘tip-toe vintage, walking on tightrope’ with balance between the tannins, alcohol and acidities being the hardest element to achieve.

They started the harvest on 27 August – the earliest ever – with the team, ‘having to make decisions about blending even before the vinifications’ due to such limited yields.

A counter-intuitive result

Olivier Berrouet, technical director at Château Petrus, was pleased with the final result: ‘What impressed us was the gap between what happened during the season and what we could have expected and what’s in the glass.

'It’s the real strength of the clay – the wines don’t carry the wounds of the vintage’.

In terms of style, he said it’s a ‘powerful Petrus’ where the goal was to ‘control the tannic power and to not allow the structure to dominate the aromatic intensity’.

Jean-Baptiste Bourotte owner of Château Clos du Clocher calls 2025 a, ‘counter-intuitive / paradoxical vintage because of the weather and the surprising resulting style’.

Christian Moueix, president of the négociant house Établissements Jean-Pierre Moueix and owner of family properties that include Châteaux Bélair-Monange, La Fleur-Pétrus and Trotanoy described the vintage as ‘saved by the rain’ and something ‘miraculous’ and ultimately calling it, ‘a good to very good vintage’.

Further reading from this report

• St-Emilion
• Pessac-Léognan & Graves
• Dry whites
• Cru Bourgeois
• Pauillac
• St-Estèphe
• Margaux
• St-Julien
• Sauternes

Bordeaux 2025: Top wines

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