2020 in Bottle: vintage overview

As we kick off our 2020 In Bottle report, you’re going to find many superlative bottles of wine in what has been jostling with 2019 for being the most successful year in Bordeaux since 2016.

You can now see the scores for the 2020 whites, Right Bank reds, and Pessac-Léognan and Graves from the Left Bank. Please keep checking the Left Bank page for the Médoc wines over the next few days. If you want to see all the 2020 wines listed together, either select 2020 in the search area (all tasting dates will be listed), or click here.

Overall, it was a warm, early year impacted by a rainy start, with changeable weather returning from mid-September, but with a dry summer that had almost zero rainfall in July, and a water deficit across the summer months that came in at 60% lower than average. Rainfall in May and June was uneven – with up to 200mm in parts of the Médoc but just 40mm in Pomerol. The Mérignac weather station recorded just 9% more rainfall than average in September, with a final count of just over 90mm and with a little more rain falling in the Médoc than on the Right Bank. Pessac-Léognan remained relatively dry. You can find a full breakdown of the vintage from the Bordeaux school of oenology (ISVV) here.

To recap:

• Small yields (around 25% lower on average than 2019), thick skins, small berries, meaning there were big tannins and plenty of well-structured, concentrated wines. They needed careful management over ageing, and many of them now in bottle are of excellent quality, often serious in character, and have great ageing potential.
• The difference in tannins is a key signature of the vintage, veering between powerful and confident to overly dry and constricting.
• Alcohols overall are well in balance, higher than 2021, but typically lower than 2018 and 2019.
• August was dry but not overly hot, which allowed full, slow maturing in all grape varieties (and keeping alcohol levels reasonable).
• Clay-limestone soils did brilliantly against the heat of the summer, favouring the St Emilion plateau, and you’ll find some exceptionally concentrated and impressive wines from the gravels and clay-gravels of Pauillac and St Julien.

The lockdown vintage
2020 was also a vintage where the winemakers were on their own, more than any other in living memory – as of course were the rest of us. Lockdown in France began in March 17, 2020, (at noon, so I just read, although I had forgotten that detail). It was first planned for 15 days, then 30 days, and finally extended to May 11, with only limited exceptions for agricultural workers – and getting into the vineyards right from the start was key, as 2020 had an exceptionally early bud break, and periods of heavy rain (58% above average for the month of March, although fine weather returned at the end of the March, as most of us can remember from our extended time spent at home).

It wasn’t until June that cafés and pubs were allowed to reopen, although case numbers rose over the summer, and masks, curfews and eventually a second lockdown were gradually reintroduced just in time for harvest and vinification in the October and November of 202

I only saw one estate that mentioned 2020 as the ‘covid vintage’ on their back label (Château Camensac in AOC Haut-Médoc, with the haunting and charmingly stilted words ‘the first covid containment took place under bright sunlight and high temperatures’), but surely it had an impact on the wines and winemaking. No outside visitors, no exchanges over glasses of wine with visiting winemakers and wine buyers, no easy exchanges with neighbouring winemakers and vineyard hands over what was happening during the season – with harvest taking place under strict conditions of testing and separation of teams.

The following year saw little respite, and in Spring 2021, when the Primeurs for this 2020 vintage took place, it was the second year running that travel to Bordeaux was all but impossible, as rolling lockdowns –  or more usually curfews – were once again imposed between February and May, making for the second year when I was one of only a handful of people to taste these wines in Bordeaux, without the potential issues of long-distance transport of En Primeur samples.

Lauren Lebrun at Château Olivier summed up what many people told me as we tasted through the wines that are now in bottle, and looked back on what already feels like a hundred years ago, even though it is just two years on from En Primeur:

‘We have never had a vintage where the entire team was so present throughout the whole process – able to experience the daily changes in the vineyard, to be present with the birds, the wildlife, the growing vines. For estate directors such as myself, even the lack of travel had an impact. It’s a time, from tastings with the Union de Grands Crus, the Commanderie de Bordeaux and others, where typically there are natural exchanges and discussions about sales, winemaking, running the estate, how different markets are performing and so on. This is often a source of enthusiasm and comfort, and there were so many of these moments that we didn’t have this year’.

It meant of course, that this was vintage where everyone was concentrated on the wine and the winemaking process without outside distractions, and so I believe was, both philosophically and practically, a hugely important one, because it allowed estates to put the spotlight on their own processes, and perhaps question certain accepted practices, or double-down on others.

‘We sit and talk about the 2020 like it was a normal wine,’ said Peter Sisseck of Château Rocheyron in St Emilion, ‘but in fact it was made in extraordinary circumstances.’

All of this means tasting them now is particularly fascinating. You will see big differences in style, and it’s interesting to question if this is partly as a result of this unusual way of working, this particularly intense exchange between winemaker and estate.

Prices
Bordeaux 2020 release prices were generally higher than the discounts that we saw with the 2019 vintage release (which was similarly impacted by the covid lockdowns, and general concerns over not having an En Primeur campaign at all. Liv-ex noted at the time that release prices rose by 5% versus 2019 in the first four weeks, on an ex-Bordeaux basis (€ per bottle), and by 34% on average in the final week of the campaign. It said release prices overall in the UK (pound sterling) rose by 27% on average, ‘wiping out’ 2019 discounts.

The vintage has so far enjoyed limited trading activity in the secondary market, accounting for just 1% of Bordeaux’s trade by value last year. This is likely to change as the wines become physically available.

According to Livex data, the 2020 offers relative value, as the chart above shows. They have looked at the top movers over recent weeks, and it is dominated by Pomerol names in the top three positions (with Beychevelle a notable exception in showing a 25% rise, at a relative value price point).