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Bordeaux 2025:
Vintage Report
"Should I stay, or should I go?"
It's the question The Clash were asking in 1981, and it's the question Bordeaux's customers are asking in 2026. If I go there will be trouble — the relationships, the allocations, the wines I've collected for twenty years and want to keep collecting. And if I stay it will be double — release prices that have been higher than the market for years now, with no certainty that 2025 will be different. This is a report on which 2025 Bordeaux are worth staying for, and a thought on what would make staying the easier answer.
En Primeur was built on three reasons to buy early: the wine would be more expensive later, you wouldn't be able to get it at all, or the producer needed your cash. None of these arguments holds in the same way it once did. The customer who buys 2025 Bordeaux now is making a different kind of decision than the customer who bought 1995 or 2005. They have to want the wine, rather than need it. Want must be earned every year, by every wine, on its own merits. Want responds to genuine scarcity, to wines that taste of where they come from, and to producers who have earned trust over decades. Want is harder to mobilise than need, but more durable when you do. Want only converts into action when waiting feels like a risk — of missing the wine, of paying meaningfully more later, or of losing access altogether.
2025 will be remembered as the smallest crop since 1991, produced during a hot, dry, precocious growing season. Vines endured because of water reserves banked during the wet 2024 and because rain arrived at key moments — Easter rainfall before the summer heat, late August rain that saved the vintage, intermittent September showers. Bordeaux vintages were historically doomed by rain. Now they depend upon it for their survival.
2025 sits alongside 2003 and 2022 as one of the three hottest, driest growing seasons of the century by days over 35°C. Two things conspired against yields. Flowering had been poor in 2024, which set fewer bunches for 2025 before the season had even started. Then the drought kept the berries that did set from ever reaching full size. Romain Courtier at Cantenac Brown told me the berries were the smallest ever measured at the property since records began. This is a small vintage in a region that is actively shrinking — 20,000 hectares grubbed up or abandoned over three years. The mood last week was largely one of wanting the En Primeur system to work, and for wine to flow.
The late Denis Dubourdieu set out five criteria for a great Bordeaux vintage. He believed three must be met to make good wine, four for very good, and all five for great:
1. Early, rapid flowering, assuring sufficient yield and homogeneous ripening.
2. Sufficient hydric stress at fruit-set to limit berry growth and determine future tannic content.
3. Enough hydric stress to halt vegetative growth before véraison, channelling the vine's resources into the grapes.
4. Complete maturity assured by optimum functioning of the canopy through to harvest.
5. Good harvest weather without dilution or rot, allowing full maturity even in late-ripening varieties.
These conditions were articulated before the current era when too much heat and stress, rather than too little ripeness, has become the defining problem. Dubourdieu's framework remains an excellent benchmark, but 2025 tests it. I'd argue at least four, and possibly all five, conditions were met.
Conditions one, two and three were met emphatically. Flowering and fruit-set were quick and even. Hydric stress was established very early, contributing to thick skins and a high ratio of pips and skins to juice. Berries were genuinely small — Merlot was described to me as looking like caviar. Vegetative growth halted early, and there was no significant resumption after the late August rain. The caveat: Dubourdieu asked for sufficient stress, not maximum. He also assumed vegetative growth would stop because the vine was ready to ripen, not because it had nothing left. Both assumptions were tested in 2025. On clay and limestone, with deeper water reserves, conditions were close to ideal. On lighter soils, stress arguably tipped past the point of helping the wine — and growth stopped not because the vine had reached the right developmental stage but because it couldn't carry on.
Condition four is where 2025 raises real questions. Several châteaux spoke of hydric stress limiting photosynthesis during ripening — constrained functioning rather than optimum. Some vines were picked before the grapes had reached optimum maturity, perhaps for fear of losing freshness or gaining alcohol. Which châteaux reached the kind of physiological and aromatic maturity that comes from a fully functioning canopy ripening through a normal length growing season is the question that will only be answered conclusively in bottle.
Condition five was met. Cooler-than-average September with intermittent rain worked in 2025's favour: rain wasn't heavy enough to dilute small, thick-skinned berries, and it kept potential alcohols moderate. Disease pressure was minimal. Four of the five conditions met emphatically; the fourth — full canopy function through ripening — is a question that will be answered vineyard by vineyard and confirmed once the wines are in bottle.
In 2025, wines had to decide what they were going to be. Surprising freshness was the mantra of last week's tastings — lower-than-expected alcohols, the diurnal swing from daytime concentration to nighttime freshness. Omri Ram at Lafleur described the best wines as having "full ripeness but cool aromatics." Guillaume Pouthier at Les Carmes Haut-Brion picked grapes at 14% potential alcohol and made a wine at 13% via whole-bunch vinification. At Château Margaux, Philippe Bascaules stuck to his belief in the vegetative cycle calendar and didn't begin Cabernet Sauvignon until 19 September, when some châteaux had already finished. His best plots weren't picked until 23–29 September.
These were the decisions that defined 2025. The wines below are the ones that came through them with the clearest sense of what they wanted to be — the very best of the vintage, likely to be in high demand and worth chasing.
- Château Margaux — One of the wines of the vintage, but at significant cost in quantity. Yields of just 22 hl/ha; only 37% made it into the Grand Vin. A hypothetical blend of the concentration of 2022 with the florals of 2023.
- Lafite Rothschild — The last vintage produced in the wooden vats of the old winery, and a fitting sign-off. Aloof at this stage, as Lafite tends to be, but all the components are there.
- Mouton Rothschild — The highest ever Cabernet Sauvignon proportion at 98%. A swaggering Mouton, beautifully judged at 13.1% ABV.
- Montrose — A wine of First Growth ambition, with the heart of Terrace 4 at its core. Pierre Graffeuille calls 2025 the vision of Montrose: "the attributes of the great vintages without any excess."
- Cheval Blanc — Joins 2015 and 2022 as vintages where everything went into the Grand Vin. Yields of 15 hl/ha. August potential alcohol of 14–14.5%, brought down to 12.7% by 60mm of late rain. A vintage saved by a fortnight.
- Figeac — High Cabernet content helped: 38% Merlot, 32% Cabernet Sauvignon, 30% Cabernet Franc. 13% ABV. 25 hl/ha, with 90% making the Grand Vin.
- Beauséjour (Duffau-Lagarrosse) — The new era under Joséphine Duffau-Lagarrosse continues. She described 2025 as "the kind of wine we want to make: fresh, elegant, vibrant, with length." The estate has narrowed its global distribution to four merchants and confirmed 2025 pricing will be stable.
- Vieux Château Certan — Alexandre Thienpont described 2025 as a reference year for Cabernet Franc, alongside 2011 and 2018. One of the clear wines of the vintage, on either bank.
- Les Carmes Haut-Brion — Pouthier continues to make the most singular wine in Bordeaux: 54% Cabernet Franc, 29% Cabernet Sauvignon, 17% Merlot, brought to 13% from a vineyard potential of 14–15.5%.
I tasted around 200 wines last week. Many that aren't named here — Haut-Brion, Pichon Comtesse, Pichon Baron, Haut-Bailly, Smith Haut Lafitte, La Mission Haut-Brion, Domaine de Chevalier, Léoville Las Cases, Ducru-Beaucaillou, Léoville Barton, Lynch-Bages, Calon Ségur, Pontet-Canet, Rauzan-Ségla, Palmer, Ausone, Pavie, Angélus, La Conseillante, L'Église-Clinet, Canon, Bélair-Monange, Clinet, La Fleur-Pétrus, La Gaffelière — were wines I rated highly.
Their absence isn't a judgement. I'd rather write about each one specifically when its price is on the table than offer general endorsements before the prices arrive. For most wines outside the genuinely scarce, the question of whether to buy at release is closely tied to the price. Pontet-Canet releases on Wednesday 29 April and will be the first real indicator of what to expect from this campaign.
"Darling, you got to let me know"
Bordeaux 2025 does not have a wine problem. The best wines are excellent. But the campaign ahead will play out against a backdrop of tension between vintage quality and customer caution.
Producers have a real case for firm pricing. Yields at the top châteaux are down 25–40%. Quality is high. Many reduced prices last year by up to 30%, which they regard as having been a meaningful concession. Costs are rising, and almost all have made considerably less wine than they have in years.
Customers have learned to be wary. The secondary market for recent vintages — 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 — sits below release price for many wines. A customer who bought wines En Primeur and finds them cheaper in bottle has reasonable cause for caution. Last year's campaign was difficult; only a handful of wines sold through. There are wines from 2024 still unsold where the market won't easily accept increases in 2025. The release price is also not the end of the cost: storage and the opportunity cost of capital tied up in unfinished wine both add to it.
For most wines, what would help the campaign is a meaningful discount to current market prices for comparable back vintages. Historically that compensation was 20–30%; the case for it being closer to the higher end of that range, or beyond, is stronger now than it has been for some time. The wines that price compellingly will find buyers. The wines that don't will likely face a slower campaign than their quality deserves.
Wine has to flow through the system to where it will be enjoyed. Few merchants now buy En Primeur for stock; they commit to what they can sell. The négociants in Bordeaux historically took their allocations every year regardless. 2024 was the first vintage where some wine was handed back to the châteaux. The system is adapting in real time, and 2025 arrives at a moment of transition.
This isn't only a Bordeaux story. The market for En Primeur and new releases is soft across the board. The Burgundy 2024 and Piedmont 2022 En Primeur campaigns have both struggled in the first months of 2026. Meanwhile, the market for maturing, ready-to-drink Bordeaux, Burgundy and Barolo remains robust. The two facts are connected.
The collectors who sustained En Primeur as a system are slowing down. They're drinking through cellars they perhaps filled too deep and selling the surplus, which fuels a secondary market that competes directly with new releases. Younger buyers tend towards wines they can drink immediately rather than wines they must hold — and pay storage on — for a decade. The behavioural foundation that En Primeur was built upon is shifting. Bordeaux is simply the most visible expression of this. As the largest fine wine region with the most developed En Primeur infrastructure, it shows the strain first and most clearly. But every region selling wine years before it's ready to drink faces the same question: what does the system look like when the buyers who sustained it are no longer there in the same numbers, and the buyers replacing them have different habits?
Those are questions the next decade will answer. The question this campaign has to answer is narrower: can a genuinely exciting vintage move through a system in transition?
2025 is an opportunity. It’s not a universally strong vintage at all price points like 2016, but the best wines are very good and, in many cases, exceptional. The pricing argument in 2024 was perhaps overblown — many customers simply didn't want the wines, at any price. 2025 doesn't have a wine problem. The campaign's success will depend on producer, merchant and customer all playing their part in moving good wine to where it will be enjoyed.
Martin Tickle, Fine Wine Buyer, April 2026
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