Wines to Watch: Our 2024 La Place de Bordeaux Recommendations
Our 2024 La Place de Bordeaux recommendations
Every September the wine world gathers to welcome the release of the latest vintages from some of the world’s most in-demand names. Taking place through La Place de Bordeaux marketplace, its modern history of the last two decades charts the growing appreciation for some of the New World’s most spectacular wines. We delve into some of our 2024 La Place favourites below.
What is La Place de Bordeaux?
Whilst its history spans the last eight centuries, the global marketplace – La Place de Bordeaux – only became truly international just two decades ago, sparked by the arrival of the first vintage of Baron Phillipe De Rothschild and Concha y Toro’s joint project, Almaviva. Today we see a growing number of wines from Austria, South Africa, Chile and beyond, with the number of New World gems continuing to rise. With over 100 estates showcasing their latest releases, there is growing pressure to stand out as each vies for the attention of the discerning critics and collectors of both the New and Old World.
This year there are some outstanding releases, and we’ve highlighted below the bottles that we will be recommending our clients add to their collection.
USA
“A brilliant Opus.”
100 Points — Jane Anson
Opus One 2021, Napa Valley
One of the leading wineries in Napa Valley, Opus One first debuted at La Place in 2004, and its global popularity has continued to ascend.
Due to the Californian wildfires in 2020, this is the first release of Opus One in two years, with the estate making the tough decision not to bottle the 2020 vintage. Thankfully for fans of the estate, 2021 provided exceptional growing conditions and the wine comes to market complete with a perfect 100-point score from Jane Anson.
Created in 1978 by America’s Robert Mondavi and Baron Philippe de Rothschild of Château Mouton-Rothschild, Opus One’s perfect marriage between Bordeaux structure and Napa richness catapulted it to instant fame. It is “the Opus style”, as Jane Anson comments in her review, that in our opinion makes the wine so appealing, with its freshness of fruit and structure endearing it as much to fans of the old world as it does to the new. Described as “a classical vintage”, the 2021 Opus will delight for its purity, precision and subtle beauty, more akin to the Medoc perhaps than to Napa.
Italy
“The 2021 Masseto is a stunner. [It] is quite simply the most exquisite, refined young Masseto I have ever tasted.”
100 Points — Antonio Galloni
Masseto 2021, Toscana
The sister property to Italian powerhouse Ornellaia, “Super Tuscan” Masseto also holds a similar level of prestige, rivalling those of some of the top Bordeaux and Burgundy. From the creation of its first vintage in 1987, the estate made a name for itself upon creating Bordeaux-style wines with Merlot-dominant blends, famously described as “The Petrus of Tuscany.”
Benefitting from vines with over 40 years of ageing, its fruit is cultivated on the “massi” blue clay of which the wine gets its name.
Masseto volumes are always small, so coupled with 2021 being a blockbuster Tuscan vintage, this 100% Merlot will be snapped up, especially with a superlative 100-point score from Antoni Galloni.
“A monument to perfect winemaking.”
Monica Larner
Solaia 2021, Toscana
This is one of the most hotly anticipated releases of September, as 2021 is undoubtedly the best year in Tuscany since the incredible 2016 vintage, yielding wines that have that magic combination of fruit concentration, structure and superb overall balance.
Antonio Galloni’s 100-point score is the first he has awarded to Solaia, remarkably eclipsing his scores for both the 2015 and 2016 vintages.
Spain
“Intense, powerful, balanced, nuanced and gripping with a drawn out finish, providing more evidence of this compelling wine.”
96 Points — Jane Anson
Yjar 2020, Rioja
Having produced only four vintages so far, the enigmatic Yjar has been dubbed a “cult wine in the making” (Jane Anson), following on from the fervour that surrounded its first vintage in 2017.
This wine provides a seriously compelling argument that Spain is one of the most undervalued countries in the wine world. Those in the know would argue that there are few producers more worthy of legendary status in Spain than the one and only Telmo Rodriguez. For over 30 years, he has focused on creating a range of wines from plots located all over Spain, each one meticulously crafted to fully express their individual locations. Yjar was the first Rioja to be distributed through La Place de Bordeaux and a wine that has consistently taken home multiple 100-point scores from the world’s most acclaimed critics. Indeed, James Suckling called it, “Telmo Rodriguez’s Rioja answer to world-class Bordeaux”.
