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Bordeaux 2018 in bottle: full overview plus top scoring wines

After tasting more than 550 Bordeaux wines from the 2018 vintage now that they've been bottled, Jane Anson says it is a highly successful vintage with notable highpoints particularly from Pauillac, Margaux and St-Emilion.

Bordeaux 2018 overall score

Left Bank reds score

Right Bank reds score

Dry whites score

Sauternes score


Overviews and top scoring wines for Left Bank and Right Bank

Plus individual appellation overviews for:

St-Estèphe, Pauillac, St-Julien, Margaux, Médoc / Haut Médoc/ Listrac / Moulis and Pessac-Leognan & Graves |

St-Émilion, Pomerol, satellite appellations / lesser communes |

Sauternes & Barsac


Tasting conditions

As with the en primeur tastings earlier in the year, the 2018 in bottle assessment coincided with a lockdown in France where travelling became complicated. But in the end, between châteaux visits and home deliveries, I tasted around double the number of wines as for last year’s 2017 in bottle report; close to 600 labels in total.

A particularly useful exercise, where the atypical conditions that were highlighted in our en primeur report have resulted in some issues over ageing. This is still a highly successful vintage for red Bordeaux, but there are hesitations over certain wines, and I am revising down my overall rating for the vintage to 4, not 4.5, out of 5 for the reds (although the rating remains unchanged at 4.5 for the Right Bank in the regional breakdowns).

For the whites and the sweets, my vintage rating stays the same, 3.5 for dry whites and 3 for Sauternes.


Scroll down for Jane Anson’s top scoring Bordeaux 2018 wine tasting notes and scores



See Jane Anson’s top scoring Bordeaux 2018 wine tasting notes and scores

The following 25 wines scored 97 points or above.


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