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Average Scores of all Estates within a Region

The above chart represents the average of the scores gathered by all the Bordeaux wineries by wine growing region (AOC in French). For more details on a specific chateau, please use our search engine at the right hand's side of each page. This tool is extremely useful to pick the best wines at Bordeaux Futures offerings and wine auctions.  

88 to >90 = excellent
86 to 88 = very good
84 to 86 = good
< 84 = generally pleasant but lacks character, complexity or depth

The 2001 vintage in the Bordeaux region is characterized by the very mixed quality of the red wines. A further analysis tends to show that if a relatively little number of wineries (approximately 10% of the 290 under review) have definitely produced great wines, a large majority of producers have unfortunately missed their target and deliver very mediocre wines. The vintage's average score is clearly one of the lowest for the last 5 years because of the unusually large number of wines with average ratings below the Winemega 80 - 82/100 mark. 

Our recommendation is to stick to the very best wines of our rankings and to be extremely careful about overpriced wines. Many producers have indeed lowered their prices by 15% from last year's prices. But some others have left their prices at the same level, which are approximately 15% to 20% more expensive than the 1999 vintage. This is truly unacceptable!

In 2001, the sweet white wines of the Sauternes-Barsac region may have produced one of the best vintage of all times.  As illustrated in the above chart, the average scores are much higher than for the other regions. It is to be noted that Château Climens hasn't proposed any tasting samples this year and therefore is not in our rankings.

Finally the white dry wines of the region are really excellent according to the comments of our Contributors.

This year we have statistically estimated the effect of the critics' scores on the price - or "Score Effect". This measure is particularly strong in 2001 with an average +12% price increase for each additional scoring point. In comparison, the Score Effect was +15% in 2000, +9% in 1999, +12% in 1998 and finally +10% in 1997.