On Tuesday, Antonio Galloni (Vinous) published his report on the Bordeaux 2024 vintage – The Razor’s Edge — with his scores and tasting notes.
‘It is no secret that Bordeaux endured a challenging growing season’, said Galloni, but ‘the most skilled winemakers found a way to make gorgeous wines’. Nevertheless, ‘the 2024s are all over the place in terms of quality’, and buyers will need to ‘be selective’. He is not alone in this assessment of the vintage: Jane Anson went so far as to say that, in her 20+ years of En Primeur tasting, she had never seen such a stark difference between highs and lows.
Our analysis of Galloni’s scores (considering the 74 of the wines we cover during En Primeur for which there was a full set of scores between 2012 and 2024), puts his average for the 2024s at 93.56 — higher than his averages of 90.2 and 92.78 for the 2013s and 2012s respectively, but lower than his average for any other recent vintage. His average for the 2014 vintage, however, is only a touch higher.
According to Galloni, rain was not the sole downfall of the 2024 vintage. ‘Weather’, he said, ‘is no longer the critical element in determining the quality of wines and therefore a vintage’. While the vines were facing rot, dilution and uneven fruit set, chateaux were facing an unsuccessful 2023 En Primeur campaign. Those depending on En Primeur for capital were ‘forced to reduce vineyard operations’. Other critics have also made clear the need for financial resource in difficult vintages — green harvesting and extensive sorting is expensive. Galloni credits also ‘the people, their skill, their vision and their access to technology’ as quality-determining factors.
While Anson and others found more successes on the Right Bank, Galloni believes the 2024 is ‘clearly a Left Bank vintage’. The slow ripening of Cabernet Sauvignon is generally considered detrimental in cool and rainy vintages – under ripeness leading to thin and vegetal wines – but Galloni believes that Merlot’s proneness to coulure and rot made for a far greater challenge. He found the greatest heterogeneity in quality in Pomerol, where many vines were damaged by hailstorms, and in Pessac, where many of the reds were ‘excessively light’ but the whites were ‘terrific’.
What were his top scoring wines?
Galloni awarded his top score of the vintage (95-98) to only three wines – Rauzan-Segla, La Conseillante and Cos d’Estournel. A further 10 wines received his second-best score of 95-97 points. No First Growths feature on this list – Latour was his top-rated in the peer group, receiving a score range of 94-97 points and Haut-Brion followed with 94-96.
Several white wines feature amongst Galloni’s top scoring wines – Domaine de Chevalier Blanc, Doisy-Daene L’Extravagant , Haut-Brion Blanc, and Smith Haut Lafitte Blanc. He describes them as ‘some of the finest wines in 2024’, noting that ‘we will be seeing more dry whites, given consumer trends that are increasingly shifting towards white wines’.
