Bordeaux 2000 vs 2001: How the top wines taste now

Bordeaux 2000 met with more immediate acclaim but how have the vintages aged? Jane Anson held a re-tasting of wines from five top names, including Haut-Brion and Angélus, at 67 Pall Mall in London.

A full three years after the millennium vintage, in April of 2003, journalist and science correspondent David Adam in the Guardian newspaper was asking ‘Why is the Bordeaux 2000 vintage so good?’

The answer, according to Adam, was ‘Good grapes, good luck and a little savvy marketing’.There was without doubt a lot riding on the millennium vintage, and the fact that the weather delivered made a lot of châteaux and wine merchants extremely happy.The average price rise from 1999 (the year, incidentally, that the euro was first introduced) was 22%, with Firsts Growths up by 40% by the time of their third and final round of wine releases, offered at €380 per bottle.

The following year, 2001, was never going to be able to live up to hype. In terms of production figures, it delivered around 5% less volume than 2000, and it didn’t deliver the magic three zeros of the millennium.

Looking closer at them, these are true opposing vintages, and they were not immediately seen as a champion pairing in the way that, for example, 1989 and 1990 had been. But over time, the brilliance of 2001 has become ever clearer and today each has its champions.

We were right in the middle of the Parker years here, when low yields and close cropping, especially on the Right Bank, was high.

The key wine consultants were Michel Rolland and Jacque Boissenot, with Denis Dubourdieu just two years in to his first red wine consultancy at Château Haut-Bailly, even if he was long established for dry whites and sweets.

The idea of treating different vineyard plots in entirely different ways during the growing season was still in its infancy, but pretty much every big cellar had temperature-controlled tanks.

Bordeaux 2000 vintage recap

This vintage in particular has needed a long time to open. It was a richly tannic year and in all honesty hasn’t always been the most charming of vintages.

In terms of the weather conditions, there was a warm and fairly dry start to the year, until April brought more than double the usual rainfall with 173mm. May and June were similarly difficult, being cool and fresh, but from July things heated up, with August and September particularly hot and dry.

Some young vines suffered, but most saw brilliant conditions that delivered high sugars and deeply coloured tannic wines (although as maturity was still usually measured by sugar rather than full phenolic ripeness, this caused issues in some cases).

On 10 October, serious rain began falling but most grapes were in by then.

Bordeaux 2001 vintage recap

Sculpted, elegant, balanced, the ultimate insider’s year. Many producers knew at the time that they were getting great juice into the cellars, but the market was still very much involved with the 2000s and it took time for buyers to take notice.

Those rains that began in October 2000 kept falling throughout winter, and by the time April 2001 rolled around, Bordeaux had seen double the rainfall of the past 20 year average.

Things only really dried up by May and June, when half of the usual rain fell, and there was even and rapid flowering. Things stayed mainly dry over for the rest of the year (excepting some rains in July), with sunny and clear August and September, but temperatures were around one degree cooler than average during harvest.

This favoured slow-ripening, giving complex, elegant and well balanced fruits with higher levels of acidity than 2000.

This tasting

All of this makes retasting the solar 2000 against the elegant 2001 fascinating.

This horizontal of the two years was held at 67 Pall Mall recently, a private member club in London that has a cellar with over 4,000 wines on the list and access to plenty of bottles with great provenance.

We tasted through a fascinating line up of 10 wines, five from each year, of Rauzan-Ségla, Haut-Bailly, Vieux Château Certan, Angélus and Haut-Brion.

I was fully expecting to prefer the 2001 across the board but I was totally underestimating the seductive qualities of the 2000 now the tannins are softened and integrated.

Tasting notes and ratings on five Bordeaux 2000 and 2001 wines

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