Harvest 2025: Beauty Contest with Only Winners
Some years you fight, other years the grapes practically fight back. 2025 has been a vintage of contrasts: near-perfect conditions for ripening, almost ruined by extremes of drought and heat. We started picking two weeks earlier than in 2024, and—interestingly—wrapped up on the very day last year’s harvest began.
The challenge came in mid-August when a two-month drought collided with a scorching heatwave in the forties. Many vines switched from “grape production” to “survival mode,” shedding leaves and leaving clusters exposed to the furnace. Berries shriveled on the vine and we probably lost a third of the crop that way. Yields are again painfully low—around 15 hl/ha. Believe it or not, that’s above 2024, but only because last year was a complete joke (quantity, not quality!). Still, we are miles below the norm. By design. We crop and harvest for perfection, concentration, and precision—and this year we have that in spades.
The fruit is as good as we’ve seen in years: no illnesses, beautifully uniform berries, acidity intact, but sugars naturally higher thanks to all that sunshine. At the sorting table there was almost nothing to do—except marvel at just how clean and ripe everything looked.
Our eclectic team—Swedes, Finns, French, and even an Argentinian—worked like clockwork. Hand-harvesting, hauling, and laughing their way through another round of 6 grape varieties, now safely in the cellar. It’s been the reward for months of struggle in the vineyard, and the result is nothing short of exhilarating. Working side by side with such a crew, humbled every day by the fact that we are reliant on nature and merely guiding what it gives us—it’s a privilege. Each of us will have contributed to the final result, in ways both big and small. It’s looking very promising indeed, but make no mistake: scarcity will be the keyword.
This year it’s impossible to single out one grape above the rest—they were all in such fine form. If pressed, though, a special nod goes to our Castets, which achieved skin ripeness from heaven while keeping sugars and potential alcohol in check. But really, in a beauty contest, they all came out winners.
Now comes the hard part: not screwing it up. The focus shifts to the cellar, where precision matters more than ever. And yes—we currently have TEN (!) cuvées bubbling away: each grape, plus carbonic macerations, rosés, and light reds. Welcome to the lab. It’s busy, noisy, a little chaotic—but also thrilling to see every tank with its own personality and trajectory. With perfect raw material in hand, the goal is simple: let it shine, both in absolute terms and against whatever the rest of Bordeaux throws up in 2025.
