Champagne is probably the nec plus


ultra example of blending to maintain consistency of style across vintages for Non-Vintage cuvées. Bordeaux has gone a different route, of course, in emphasizing vintage. It is legal in Bordeaux to add up to 15% of another vintage (although I have not yet encountered any château claiming to do this). The possibility offers the same dilemma as in Champagne: A poorer year could be greatly improved by adding 15% from a better year, but the consequence is to reduce the optimum of the better year. Considering the properties of a trio of years such as 2002, 2003, 2004, it is entirely possible, however, that better wines might have been made for each of those years by blending across vintages. Of course, there was no way to know that until later—which is where blending later would offer a possibility denied by blending for en primeur. And given the wild swings in climatic conditions now caused by climate change, it is entirely possible that there may be more cases to come of successive years whose conditions are so opposed that blending would make a better wine for each year than sticking rigorously to vintage. Without a doubt, there are some


complications in postponing blending. The rise of second wines means that decisions must be made in time for their release, which is of course earlier than for the grand vins. Except for those instances where the second wine really is committed to a different set of vineyard plots, there is a yin and yang between the wish to make the best possible grand vin and the need to have a second wine of high quality. It is a limitation on having a completely free hand in blending that the lots have to be set aside for the second wine. Perhaps second wines should always represent the vintage exclusively, but grand vins should be optimized with regards to all parameters?


Open to all possibilities Blending is always a compromise. Should that compromise be restricted to the choice of varieties before the en primeur tastings, or could better wine be made by allowing more time before the decision and consideration of other vintages also? In the era of the extremes of climate change, I would argue that we need to be open to all possibilities. An en primeur system makes sense when wines are sold only on allocation and there is, anyway, no opportunity for consumers to taste before they make a decision on whether or not to buy. In that situation, the producer obviously benefits by taking in the cash flow as soon as possible; the consumer benefits by assuring the supply. This is true whether there is genuine scarcity because of small production, or managed scarcity, used as a marketing tool to unbalance supply from demand (as in Napa Valley, for example). When production is on a larger


scale, some artifice is required to induce consumers to make their decision before they can taste the wines. The Bordelais have been very good at this. Until the past decade, there was a distinct financial advantage for consumers in buying en primeur, because the prices went up significantly on release. This made the decision easy in good vintages but not so straightforward in poor vintages. That situation was dealt with by linking


Given the wild swings in climatic conditions, there may be successive years whose conditions are so opposed that blending would make a better wine for each year than sticking to vintage


allocations in top vintages to the takeup of allocations in preceding poor vintages. The en primeur system has now softened to the point at which the necessity and advantage of early purchase has been rather whittled away. Another factor is that the shift in style of Bordeaux—partly as the result of climate change, partly as the result of changed criteria for harvesting—has made the wines more approachable much sooner, and therefore easier to assess when young. When it was the case that young Bordeaux was difficult to appreciate, expert opinion was needed to assess a vintage in the early stages. It would have been only marginally easier to assess the wine in the first couple of years in the marketplace than in barrique. So, there was not much advantage in waiting for the wines to be released. (To be sure, collective expert opinion could still get things seriously wrong; there were “vintages of the century” in the 20th century that turned out to be nothing of the sort.) Now that it is easier to assess wines when they are released, there is more to be said for waiting to form your own judgment. As things stand, the decision on blending in Bordeaux is closely linked to the need to present the wines en primeur almost as soon as they have started their aging in barriques. Blending is not the only feature of vinification that depends on the sales system—the fashion for performing malolactic fermentation in barrique is often attributed to the need to make the wines look charming at this point. (However, some châteaux have backed away from this and gone back to performing MLF in vat.) I suppose it would be naive to overemphasize the dependence of winemaking on sales, since the purpose of making wine, after all, is to sell it. But it’s an interesting question nonetheless: In an ideal (disconnected) world, what would make the best wine? 


THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 87 | 2025 | 75


Illustration by Dan Murrell


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152  |  Page 153  |  Page 154  |  Page 155  |  Page 156  |  Page 157  |  Page 158  |  Page 159  |  Page 160  |  Page 161  |  Page 162  |  Page 163  |  Page 164  |  Page 165  |  Page 166  |  Page 167  |  Page 168  |  Page 169  |  Page 170  |  Page 171  |  Page 172  |  Page 173  |  Page 174  |  Page 175  |  Page 176  |  Page 177  |  Page 178  |  Page 179  |  Page 180  |  Page 181  |  Page 182  |  Page 183  |  Page 184  |  Page 185  |  Page 186  |  Page 187  |  Page 188  |  Page 189  |  Page 190  |  Page 191  |  Page 192  |  Page 193  |  Page 194  |  Page 195  |  Page 196  |  Page 197  |  Page 198  |  Page 199  |  Page 200  |  Page 201  |  Page 202  |  Page 203  |  Page 204  |  Page 205  |  Page 206  |  Page 207  |  Page 208  |  Page 209  |  Page 210  |  Page 211  |  Page 212  |  Page 213  |  Page 214  |  Page 215  |  Page 216  |  Page 217  |  Page 218  |  Page 219  |  Page 220