Behind the Scenes of Bordeaux En Primeur with Konstantin Baum MW

Hi, my name is Konstantin Baum. I'm a master of wine. And in this video, I'm going to take you behind the scenes of the Eau Primaire campaign. For most wine lovers, the Bordeaux Eau Primaire campaign sounds glamorous. Hundreds of the main critics, sommeliers, and wine merchants descend on Bordeaux to taste the most recent vintage in one or many of those beautiful chateaus. But what happens behind the scenes? How can you actually taste those wines? And how does it all really work? I'm going to answer those questions right now. The first step is registering for the event. Not everyone can just go and taste those wines in Bordeaux. You have to be a professional from the wine trade, and you have to register with the UGC, the Union des Grands Crus. The UGC sent me a form that I had to fill in, kind of boring stuff. And a few days later, I received the confirmation letter together with my badge. So I was ready to go. And that step was actually pretty easy. With that badge, you gain access to the regional tastings that are hosted by some of the chateaus, but you don't actually get to taste all of the wines at those regional tastings. Most of the top estates don't show their wines at the regional tastings. You actually have to come to the chateau to visit them. And getting appointments at those top estates can be quite difficult. So I had to use my network, and I scored some pretty amazing tasting opportunities, but more on that in a minute. When I arrived at Bordeaux Airport on the Sunday before the tasting week was supposed to start, I actually thought it's going to be a bit like going to a big trade fair. I expected there to be some buzz around the en premier week, but it really felt like any other day at Bordeaux Airport. The lady at the car rental place didn't really care when I told her that I'm going to the en premier tastings. And also in the city of Bordeaux, there was not a lot of buzz around en premier. I mean, the day was beautiful, and lots of people were in the streets, but there wasn't really anything related to en premier in the city of Bordeaux. I was kind of wondering whether that was due to the fact that there was less interest in Bordeaux that year, or whether it's always like that. I mean, obviously, it's not a massive trade fair with thousands and thousands of visitors. It's a more exclusive event, so you probably never really have the feeling that the whole city is focused on en premier. The en premier week kicked off with a big tasting at the Chez de Chartrand, a location right in the city center of Bordeaux next to the Garonne River. When I arrived at the location, it still felt pretty quiet, but it filled up during the day, and it was a really well-organized tasting with lots of professional tasters really focusing on the wines. You definitely got the impression that they were really trying to get everything they could out of those tastings. So yeah, it was pretty professional. It was certainly great for getting a good impression of the vintage across different regions. Most of the estates only brought one wine, unless they were also producing white wine, and then they had two, but it made it just much easier to go through the different tasting booths and just taste one wine, focused, and move on to the next. So you were actually able to cover quite a lot of ground in a very limited amount of time. Normally at those tasting events, the producers want to showcase many of their wines, so they make you taste more than one wine. They make you taste as many wines as they can usually. So having this limited to a very small number of wines per estate really helped get a better impression of the different regions and the vintage. Tasting those wines can be a challenge because they are young and unfinished wines, so they are a little bit rougher, and the tannins are a little bit more dense and a little bit more difficult to work with, but I didn't experience any palate fatigue over the course of the next few days as well. And I must say, for me, it's easier to taste a few hundred red Bordeauxs that are really young than tasting a few hundred young Rieslings. So yeah, I'm used to a lot of acidity, and that can be even more challenging than a lot of tannins. It's important to stress that the wines that are showcased at the Homme Primaire tastings are not finished wines. They are barrel samples. In some cases, they just come from one barrel or they are a blend of different barrels. You get some information on the blend and on the alcohol level, for example, but everything else is still kind of undecided, and the wine will develop over the course of the next year or two and might taste differently when it is released to the market. The question I get most frequently when it comes to tasting young wines is how can you judge the wine when it is not finished yet? And the answer is you can't quite. I mean, you can say what the potential of the wine is, but you can't definitely say that the wine will taste like this in a couple of years. In order to judge the potential, you have to judge the fruit flavor, the aroma of the wine, but it is even more important to judge the texture, the tannins, the way they are now, the acidity, and the balance between the different elements on the palate. They are really important factors for the ageability of the wine, and they're much more tangible compared to the aroma. In order to judge them correctly, you have to judge them in the context that they are in. You have to take into consideration that young wines will get a little bit more mellow over time. They will get exposure to a little bit of oxygen. In order to make the wine feel a little rounder, the fruit flavors will go a little bit into the background. Tannins will get rounder and a little less aggressive, and so is the acidity. The acidity will also get a little bit more mellow over time. The tasting in Bordeaux felt a little bit like any other trade fair. The tasters were professionals and were really focused, but you also meet quite a lot of people from all around the world, so I had some really nice conversations. I met some people that I haven't met before, and I also saw some old friends. The dress code was actually a little bit more relaxed than what I expected it to be. I just showed up in my normal clothes, but I know that in Bordeaux, people tended to be a little bit better dressed. People were usually wearing suits in the past, but that was not the case anymore. I mean, people were, I mean, there were people in suits, but many people just came in their casual clothes. But there were quite a lot of people wearing red pants in the crowd. That's kind of a Bordeaux thing, like wearing a red pair of trousers, whatever. But I was, my pants were black. The tasting was broken up into three time slots. I was on the first that finished at 11.30. That's when I jumped into my car and drove up to the Médoc to my first appointment. And it wasn't just any old appointment. I went to one of the top estates in the region. So I started off by tasting the wines at Chateau Margaux. I arrived on time, maybe a little early, and walked around to shoot some footage. I was a bit surprised to see so many security people there. There were quite a few people dressed in black, kind of making sure that no one was doing anything. I don't know, that wasn't allowed. But they were quite friendly. They showed me the way to the tasting location. And that's when it all started. I was grouped together with a few people from all around the world, mainly people from the trade. And Philippe Bascol, the managing director of Chateau Margaux, hosted us. He showed us around and took us to his tasting room. Obviously, a tasting like that is quite a bit stiffer. Everyone was quiet, and Philippe was talking for most of the time. But he was very friendly, very welcoming. And we tasted through three wines from the estate. One white, the Pavillon Blanc, and then the Pavillon Rouge, the second wine of the estate, and finished with the Chateau Margaux from the 2025 vintage. The tasting was really great for getting a better understanding of how Chateau Margaux, as an individual producer, handled the problems of the vintage. And they made a wine that was quite different to the wines from many of its neighbors. It was more alcoholic, a little bit more concentrated, fairly late harvested. But it was good to hear Philippe explain why they waited longer than many other estates and how they produced this wine in order to get a really deeper understanding of the estate, but also of the vintage in general. My next stop was at Chateau Dixon, where I arrived quite early. I parked the car in the shade because it was pretty hot and spent some time walking around, met the ducks that are living in the moat surrounding the chateau, and yeah, just spent some time in the sun. When it was time for my appointment, I went to the chateau's entrance across one of those gravel paths. This is kind of typical for Bordeaux. All of the roads are full of gravel, so you always hear that sound of boots hitting gravel. And then I went into the chateau where I was greeted by lots of dead animals. The tasting at Chateau Dixon was a little less informative and maybe also a little less welcoming, but it was fine and good enough. I had tasted enough wines for the day, so it was time for me to go to my hotel, which was located right in Pauillac, where I was going to start the next day. So I woke up early, went to see the beautiful sunrise, and then had a hearty breakfast, which is quite important during the Emprimeur week. I mean, you taste a lot of wines already in the morning, so you have to have a foundation, a solid foundation, which means you have to have some eggs or quite a lot of bread and something fatty in your belly in order to deal with all the alcohol. And then I went to L'Ange Barge, which is a beautiful estate in Pauillac, where the first regional tasting was going to take place. At L'Ange Barge, they showed the wines from Pauillac, from Saint-Esteve, from the Haut-Médoc and the Médoc. And yeah, it was a brilliant location for getting a great overview over the wines from those communes. At those tastings, they also serve lunch, but I had to skip lunch because I had a meeting scheduled for lunch at Roussant-Ceglas. So after tasting all of the wines, I jumped into the car and drove down back to Margaux. At Roussant-Ceglas, I had a very nice, very intimate tour together with the sales director, Jean-Basile Roulon, who took me around the chateau and the vineyards and talked a little bit about the context of Roussant-Ceglas. I think in Bordeaux, people don't spend enough time in the vineyards, so it was nice to start the tour in the vineyard in order to get a better understanding of where Roussant-Ceglas sources the fruit from. The tour finished at the barrel cellar, where I actually got to taste the wine directly from barrel. This is actually fairly rare during the En Primeur campaign. You usually get samples that are put together by the cellar master or whoever. In this case, you actually get to choose which barrels you wanted to taste, and I tasted the same wine from different barrels. And well, I mean, the wine tastes very different depending on the barrel as well, which makes the whole process even more complicated. It's not just about the wine and how it's going to develop over the next few years. It's also the impact of the barrel that is different from one barrel to the other. But this exercise also helped get a better understanding of the wine by being able to compare and contrast different samples. You get a better understanding of what the wine is actually all about. And one more thing on that, at Roussant-Ceglas, they actually present the final cuvee, so the wine is already blended and is now sitting in barrel. Not all of the estates do that, but at Roussant-Ceglas, they do. After the tasting, we went into their dining room and we had a beautiful lunch there with a group of people from all around the world. It was actually quite fascinating because we tasted wines from different vintages blind in order to see how wines from Roussant-Ceglas develop over time. I could have stayed there all day, but I had to move on, so I jumped into my car and drove up to Saint-Julien, where I had my next regional tasting at Chateau Léoville-Barton, where they showcased the wines from Saint-Julien, Moulisse en Médoc, and L'Istrac Médoc. Chateau Léoville-Barton is actually one of my favorite estates in the region. I had never been there, so I was a bit surprised to see that they actually have an Irish pub in the chateau, which is kind of paying tribute to their Irish heritage. And I got to taste many great wines. There were some really beautiful wines produced in Saint-Julien in 2025. My last appointment of the day was quite special. It was at Chateau Latour. I've been to Bordeaux many times, but I've never been inside Chateau Latour, so yeah, I mean, they are a little bit more difficult to get into, I guess. So I had to use my friend, Jan Konecki, who is very familiar with the estate and knows many people there, and he helped me get an appointment there. When I arrived at the estate, there was actually a security guard guarding the entrance, so you couldn't just drive in. So he checked my details, and then he gave me a map for the estate. You actually have to follow a special route to get to the car park, which is slightly hidden. So yeah, it's a big property, and it's all really well protected. However, the reception at the estate was actually really nice, and I got to taste the wines with the technical director, Hélène Ginard, which was great because she knows a lot about Chateau Latour. Chateau Latour is also interesting in the context of Homme Primaire because with the 2012 vintage, they exited the Homme Primaire system, so they are not selling their wines Homme Primaire anymore. They are aging the wines and waiting for them to be ready before releasing them. So you get to taste the current, the 2025 vintage at Chateau Latour. They show the wine, but you wouldn't be able to buy it. However, alongside with the 2025s, I also got to taste their current releases, which are the 2019 Chateau Latour, the 2020 Le Fort de Latour, and the 2021 Pauillac. So that was just amazing because you got to taste the youngest wines alongside wines that are actually ready and that were matured for several years. So it was really interesting going back and forth between the new wine and the matured wines, the wines that were supposedly ready, even though, I mean, their current releases are also not ready for consumption. I mean, you can open the bottle, you can drink it, but you should actually definitely wait a little bit before opening your 2019 Latour. So that tasting was definitely the highlight of the day. I thanked everyone and jumped back into my car and drove to the hotel to get some rest. The next morning I had to get up early to get to the airport, but on the way to the airport, I stopped at Chateau Contemers where I got to taste the wines from Margaux and Omedok Sud. Chateau Contemers is a big estate, so it was quite interesting to walk through their cellars and taste the wines from the two different appellations there and once I was done, I got into the car and drove back to the airport and that was it. That was my trip to Bordeaux for the En Primeur tastings. Overall, it was a really interesting experience. I got to taste more than 100 wines and I got a really good understanding of the 2025 vintage. If I had tasted more wines, it might've been even better, but sometimes it's also good to focus and concentrate on certain estates and certain appellations in order to dive deeper into the topic. The challenge during the En Primeur week is not necessarily the amount of wine, but being really concentrated when tasting those wines. Being able to judge a great wine on its own can be quite challenging, but tasting tens or hundreds of wines over the course of a few days is making the process even more difficult, so you really have to be focused and concentrated in order to get through the week. However, by just focusing on one vintage and tasting several wines over the course of a few days, you get a really nice picture in your head what the vintage was like and that can be extremely useful. The En Primeur tasting week is definitely a great marketing machine. I met quite a lot of influential people from all around the world, so they are still coming to Bordeaux to taste those wines. There's no other region that is able to get that much attention for their most current release still, even though it might be a little less compared to what it was like 20 years ago. However, I also think that there are some issues with those En Primeur tastings. I mean, not knowing exactly whether the wine is a true representation of the vintage of each chateau is definitely a problem. It would also be good if all of the chateaus actually showcased their wines at those regional tastings because it would just make it much easier to go through the wines and compare and contrast them rather than having to go to different chateaus individually. But I also understand that the chateaus see this as a great marketing opportunity. They get to bring people in that would normally not come into the chateau and they actually can showcase their wines without competition around. So I understand why they do it, but I think it would be better if you would be able to taste all of the wines from Pauillac, for example, at one event in order to really understand the region and understand the different chateaus even better. So I hope you enjoyed the behind-the-scenes look of the En Primeur tastings this year. Let me know whether you are planning to buy any wines En Primeur down below in the comments, but whatever you do, stay thirsty.