UGC 2020 – Celebrating the 2017 Bordeaux Vintage

This past Friday, K&L hosted our annual Union des Grands Crus (UGC) Bordeaux tasting, featuring the 2017 vintage. It remains one of the great events of any given year, as regardless of the quality of the vintage, it is one of the most comprehensive tasting events you’ll find for any given region. If you want a perspective on Bordeaux, it is all at your fingertips.

And perspective is a key word when considering the 2017s, as there are many ways to look at these wines. First up is the vintage—it was challenged by early season hail leading to some crop reduction and mid-season rains that stressed the vines, but there was also good warmth in the mid-summer, promoting ripeness. The other main challenge of the vintage is its proximity to other great years. While everybody back in the day wanted to promote the wines as a cousin to the more famed 2015s and 2016s, the reality is that 2017 remains an outlier in a string of highly regarded years.

The wines themselves, however, are certainly good-to-great wines that seem to be evolving on the right track. The vintage produced some gems, with favorites around the room ranging from St-Emilion (Canon La Gaffelière, Beau-Séjour Bécot, La Gaffelière) to St-Julien (Léoville-Barton, Beychevelle, Branaire Ducru). Some of the big wines from Pauillac showed their pedigree and typicity (Pichon Lalande, Pichon Baron, Lynch Bages), while there were certainly other favorites around the room (Malescot-St-Exupery, Domaine de Chevalier, Clinet). That said – this is a vintage that will reward collectors who find the time to taste and search out the wines that they find attractive and compelling.

Fortunately (depending on how you look at it) there will be ample opportunity to visit and revisit the 2017s. On release, the wines were priced in the range of the 2015s, perhaps a bit less depending on the property. While many early buyers will probably end up happy with what they find in the wines themselves, 2017s are outliers in the midst of an unprecedented run of vintages. The aforementioned ‘15s and ‘16s are very well-regarded and proving their merit over the past few years. But add a great 2018 vintage and a potentially superb 2019 campaign, and 2017 is left as the odd man out. This means that the wines will see less demand, and will continue to be aggressively priced down the road.

Eventually, when prices continue to rise for the other vintages from the latter half of this past decade, the ‘17s will remain stable and often provide terrific value. What many of us found in these wines En Primeur, and now in bottle—they will not reach any all-time heights, but there are many good wines that will be enjoyable early and often. 2017 might not be good as its neighbors, but the quality is much higher than many overlooked vintages in the past, and the best will be more than just mere sleepers, they’ll be solid wines with upside.