Harvest underway for Bordeaux 2023 vintage

Twelve months on from the extraordinarily early harvest of 2022, and the pickers are out again in the vineyards of Bordeaux. Certain estates, such as Château Climens in Barsac with their 100% Sémillon dry white Asphodèle, have now brought in all their grapes for their dry wine, while others are still underway – taking the time to make the most of this week’s dry, sunny (and at times extremely hot, up to 36-40C depending on location) weather.

Over at Château Cheval Blanc in St Emilion, the first Sauvignon Blanc grapes were brought in on August 23, while Château Brown in Pessac Léognan began on August 31.

‘This is another early harvest,’ says Cheval director Pierre Olivier Clouet, ‘but it is not at all the same style of vintage as last year’.

‘Our yields is much higher than last year,’ says Jean-Christophe Mau at Château Brown. ‘We have big bunches and although we lost perhaps 10% of production to mildew earlier in the season, we will still end up with a more generous yield overall’.

At Château Fleur Cardinale in St Emilion, the Sauvignon Gris and Blanc grapes are now finished, with the final Sémillons coming in this week.

‘All the indicators are green, in terms of quality and quantity,’ says owner Caroline Decoster. ‘We should finally be able to produce our first Fleur Cardinale Blanc this year, after two years of experimentation that have enabled us to produce white wine under the Intuition de Fleur Cardinale label only’.

The early ferments are showing high aromatics, and slightly lower alcohols than last year.

Reds
Right now it is way too early to give any real idea of how the red harvest is going to shape up for the 2023 vintage.

The majority of the Merlots are due to begin the week of September 18, although a few young Merlots have begun to arrive in cellars this week, with Château Moncets and Chambrun in Néac bringing in the first plots of Merlot on Wednesday September 6, with potential alcohols of 13.2% (I am including a video here, for interest, by the Néac church – voice is of director Julien Noel).

Over in St Estèphe, Pierre Grafeuille at Château Montrose is reporting a good potential yield for the red wines this year (‘so far, of course nothing is in the cellar yet’, he cautions), with very little mildew impacting the vineyard after ‘lower than average rain in this sector of the Médoc’.

The overall feel so far seems to be that 2023 have had its challenges, although with far less extremes than 2022. In general it is likely to be around one to two weeks behind 2022, closer to the 10-yearly average harvest dates.

Richard Vanrenterghem of RVS Consultants, who works with Château Pape Clement and over 100 other clients across Bordeaux, Champagne, Loire and Provence, keeps his focus on the vineyard from budbreak to harvest, before other consulting teams take over in the cellar.

• The few days from August 20-24 saw temperatures rise around 20C from one day to the next, meaning some properties began to harvest to avoid shrivelling of the white grapes.
• Temperatures as a whole however were lower across the growing season than 2022, and the first fermentations are showing alcohols in the white to be generally lower than last year, with higher natural acidities.
• The number of vineyard treatments between vintages is always an interesting comparison. Vanrenterghem said that where in 2022 there were just four or five treatments due to the dry weather meaning little vineyard disease, this year there were more typically 10 to 12.
• No irrigation demands this year like last year (even moments when it might have been needed).
• The mildew and rot threats from rain and heat periods in June, July and August meant the risk of mildew running through a vineyard within three or four days was high at certain points. That was a real problem for vineyards who have financial issues and so were not able to treat quickly enough. This was true in all sectors of Bordeaux, and some estates were not able to save anything. This means 2023 is a vintage with huge disparity.
• Merlot is more sensitive to mildew than Cabernet (Sauvignon and Franc), so it is likely to be a Cabernet-heavy year, assuming the harvest progresses well from here (although I should underline again that it is too early to know!).
• It’s another year that rewards the teams that worked hard and were reactive to changing conditions.