This year’s Top 100 Wines of France list celebrates the fantastic 2019 vintage in Bordeaux. Of the more than 5,500 French wines the JamesSuckling.com team tasted this year, the 1,500 or so Bordeaux 2019s stood out for their quality of fruit, structure and freshness. And standing atop all of them is our French Wine of the Year, the Château Smith-Haut-Lafitte Pessac-Léognan 2019. It leads the charge of 53 Bordeaux wines from the 2019 vintage in the top 100.
The 2019 Smith-Haut-Lafitte is a thought-provoking wine, exuding striking cabernet character with intense lead-pencil, asphalt and graphite notes, followed by a creamy, cashmere-like texture on the palate and beautifully integrated tannins. The winery achieved this by finding “the perfect point of ripeness in the vineyard,” according to Fabien Teitgen, Smith-Haut-Lafitte’s technical director.
BORDEAUX 2019: Fabien Teitgen of Smith-Haut-Lafitte discusses “the last easy vintage we did.”
Teitgen explained that the vintage – the middle of the fantastic trio of 2018, 2019 and 2020 – was warm, especially in August, giving creaminess and fullness to the wines, but with more freshness and acidity than 2015 because of cooler nights.
“I think ‘19 is [like] ‘15 with something more in it for us at Smith-Haut-Lafitte: more concentration of tannin, more in the body and a bit more in the freshness,” Teitgen said. He attributed part of this to the straightforward season, facilitating management of their organically- and biodynamically-farmed vineyards. “We had no problem in the vineyards, so we were able to push the grapes to full ripeness, but not overripe.”
At No. 2 is the Château Haut-Bailly Pessac-Léognan 2019. With an extremely aromatic nose of wet earth, stone, graphite and black fruit, as well as linear and fine tannins, it’s perhaps the best Haut-Bailly that we have tasted and reflects the precision in the vineyards, which are also managed organically and biodynamically. As director Veronique Saunders described it to us, “It’s a vintage with beautiful definition and that everybody will love.”
READ MORE TOP 100 WINES OF FRANCE 2021
During our tastings over the past year, we gave nine Bordeaux 2019 wines 100-point scores, including the first growth Chateaux Margaux, Lafite, and Haut-Brion (red and white) from the left bank, and Cheval Blanc, Ausone, L’Église Clinet, Lafleur and Le Pin from Saint-Emilion and Pomerol on the right bank. Most are on the list below, from Château L’Église Clinet at No. 17 to Château Lafite Rothschild at No. 100. Their rankings take affordability into account; Le Pin and Lafleur were excluded because of their extravagant prices.
While the most collectable names will be out of reach to most wine lovers, our No. 1 and No. 2 French wines of 2022 are near-perfect offerings at just over $100 a bottle, combining exceptional quality with accessibility. Moreover, the vintage was released en primeur in the first year of COVID at a relatively low overall price point, and the bottles remain affordable today.
Their breathtaking quality goes to show that, notwithstanding the rise of incredible cabernets and merlots from warmer California and Tuscany in the last few decades, Bordeaux still sets a standard in the world of fine wine. And it has evolved with the times, with greater precision than ever in viticulture and winemaking, as well as being blessed with a string of fantastic vintages from 2014 to 2020. Time will tell, of course, but these young wines have brought us so much excitement already while displaying the structure and intensity to cellar for many decades to come.
Burgundy was our runner-up region this year with 12 wines on the list. Only half are grand cru wines, including the perfect Louis Latour Chambertin Grand Cru Cuvée Héritiers Latour 2020 and Bouchard Père & Fils Chevalier-Montrachet Grand Cru Domaine 2020, at No. 16 and No. 61, respectively. But with ever-soaring prices for the most famous sites in the Cote d’Or, as demonstrated during this year’s record-breaking Hospice de Beaune auction, we are more impressed with the value-for-money bottles that be found from less-esteemed, cooler appellations like Marsannay and Fixin, which are producing riper wines in recent years because of global warming.
The 3rd-place finisher is just such a wine. The Domaine Charles Audoin Marsannay Les Favières 2020, described by Senior Editor Stuart Pigott as outmatching many 2020 grand cru red Burgundies, is of staggering concentration and finesse, with a deep core of forest berries and an almost endless finish.
The focus at Domaine Charles Audoin is on single-vineyard bottlings from Marsannay, all organically and meticulously farmed, including their one-hectare parcel called Les Favieres. It’s readily found for about $60 a bottle and is an example of the potential of more northerly or higher-altitude sites in the face of climate change.
Numbers 4, 5 and 7 in our Top 10 are from Alsace – hot on the heels of Burgundy with 11 wines on the list below. At an average price of just $55 a bottle, these grand cru rieslings and pinots offer tremendous value. The 4th-place Albert Mann Pinot Noir Alsace Grand H 2020 is a perfect wine that speaks for Alsace’s pinot noir revolution, hailing from the small town of Wettolsheim near Colmar. It’s staggeringly long and seamless and is produced using more than 50 percent whole clusters from biodynamically grown vines in the grand cru Hengst.
READ MORE BORDEAUX ANNUAL REPORT: UNICORNS CUSHION 2021’S ROUGH RIDE
The market may still be fixated on Burgundy, but we have been championing the top Cru wines of Beaujolais for a while now. They rival the grand crus of the Cote de Nuits, like our No. 9 wine, Les Héritiers Saint-Genys Morgon En Ruyère 2020, which has immense concentration, power and aging potential, from the third in a trio of warm vintages in the region (see our annual Beaujolais report). Les Héritiers Saint-Genys is a label from Domaine de Lathevalle, whose team is Burgundian and Beaujolais, with consultant winemaker Stephane Derenoncourt from Bordeaux. En Ruyère 2020 can be found at a shockingly affordable price of $25 and is well worthy of its place among our Top 10. Check out the other five Beaujolais cru on the list from Yohan Lardy, Domaine Anita, Chateau des Bachelards, Domaine Mee Godard and Jean-Marc Burgaud for wines offering an incredible quality-to-price ratio.
The Maison Champy Corton-Rognet Grand Cru 2020 is our No. 10 French wine and at $140 a bottle is the most affordable grand cru Burgundy on our list (aside from a grand cru Chablis at No. 94, La Chablisienne Chablis Grand Cru Les Preuses 2020. From organically grown pinot noir at the northern tip of the appellation, it’s a remarkably silky, elegant and floral Corton, yet with the structure that should easily allow decades of cellaring.
Stunning wines from Rhone also feature on the list this year. Check out the flawless M. Chapoutier Ermitage L’Ermite 2019 at No. 11 for pure syrah at its best, as well as seven wines from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, including the enveloping and extravagant Château de Beaucastel Châteauneuf-du-Pape Hommage à Jacques Perrin 2020 (N. 42) and one excellent value Gigondas, Les Pallières Gigondas Les Racines 2019 (N. 68). These are mostly from the warm, dry 2019 and 2020 vintages, but for a fresher, more elegant Châteauneuf-du-Pape, check out the Domaine de la Solitude Châteauneuf-du-Pape Vin de la Solitude 2019 (No. 56), a unique counoise-based blend.
As for Champagne, we made an exception on our list for the Laurent-Perrier Champagne Grand Siècle Les Réserves N.20 NV, which came in No. 67. Only several hundred magnums were produced, but it blew us away when we tasted it in the Laurent-Perrier cellars this summer. It’s a complex blend of 1999, 1997 and 1996, and it spent 21 years on lees. A couple of other 100-point wines from Henri Giraud and Krug were not included because of their extraordinary price, but can be found in our annual report. The other eight on the list are vintage Champagnes that will give so much pleasure now or in years to come.
Note: You can sort the wines below by vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.
– Claire Nesbitt, Associate Editor
