How does the 2015 Bordeaux Vintage compare ?

Now that Bordeaux en Primeur tasting is over and the last wine critics are releasing their scores, we thought it would be interesting to compare 2015 to previous vintages. Vintages studies are often based on the experience and the memory of wine makers and/or wine experts.

Here, at Scorelab, we decided to apply mathematics to those recorded experiences by filtering and comparing data.

📖 The methodology:

• Since the consistent data available are quite recent, we’ve selected only certain wine scores recorded since 2000
• To understand how great (or poor) vintage was, we used wine scores from Robert Parker, Neal Martin, Wine Spectator (our Americans), La RVF, Jacques Dupont and Rene Gabriel (the French/Swiss Team here). We only retained red wines from 3 Bordeaux classifications: Grands Crus Classés en 1855, Grand Cru Classés de Saint Emilion, and Grands Crus Classés de Graves. We also added an informal classification to the Right bank, the Grands Pomerols.
• We used the wine critics en primeur scores, normalized them on a 100 point scale using our proprietary method and made a simple arithmetic average, which gives us a comparable score for each.

By experience we know that we should see vintages like 2005 or 2009 at the top of our study, but are they? Which ones are the poor ones?

📊 What do we notice?

Here is a simple vizualisation of en Primeur scores attributed by our experts (on average) and the average GWS for those same vintages

Trends appear, and the experts seem to agree: 2005, 2009 and 2010 are great years in Bordeaux and 2013 or 2007 are poor ones. Nothing surprising here, but it reveals a consensus.

The GWS accurately describes and follows trends, so what can we expect for 2015’s vintage?

Neal Martin has published his scores. With an Average score of 93,19 (grands crus classés), it is the best vintage Neal Martin has ever score since 2000 (or ever…). It is also the best vintage for Jacques Dupont. It is the second best vintage for Rene Gabriel.

🏆 With a 92,37 Average GWS, 2015 is the best vintage of the century

We calculated the Average GWS using the score of 13 wine critics at this stage. 92,37 seems high compared to other great vintages (2009 or 2010), and it may change with time (tasting in 2 years, when wines are bottled) but we are confident in our calculation.