Bordeaux 2025 Sauternes En Primeur

In a truly exceptional year for Sauternes - and 2025 is undoubtedly one of them - the quality, balance and sheer elegance of these remarkable sweet wines leaves you utterly captivated. 

Producing great Sauternes is no easy undertaking. It demands significantly more time, labour and expense than making a conventional dry white or red wine. The harvest must wait until noble rot, Botrytis cinerea, has worked its magic, while growers painstakingly select and sort the shrivelled berries by hand, all the while keeping a nervous eye on the weather and the threat of untimely rain. It is little wonder that Sauternes producers occasionally question their sanity. 

Yet when everything aligns, the results are extraordinary. The richness and concentration, the velvety sweep across the palate, the purity of fruit and - in 2025 especially - the remarkable freshness, combine to create wines of breathtaking beauty. 

Across both Sauternes and Barsac, 2025 has delivered a vintage of outstanding consistency and quality. Tasting through the wines, we found ourselves spoiled for choice and rapidly exhausting our supply of superlatives. The depth, density and intensity that can sometimes be elusive are present here in abundance. These are richly endowed sweet wines with the structure and concentration to age magnificently for decades to come. 

We appreciate, of course, that sweet ‘dessert wines’ are enjoyed less frequently today than they once were. So allow this to be a gentle encouragement to indulge yourself: perhaps with a case of halves from a favourite château, or with the increasingly popular Tanners Mixed Sauternes Case, featuring two half bottles each from six different properties - a wonderful way to explore the diversity, charm and excitement of this extraordinary region. 

In the mixed case we have selected three great value wines from lesser-known properties - Châteaux Liot, Grand-Mayne and Myrat, all of which we felt punched above their price point this year. The other three stood out from their peers when we tasted nearly all the Sauternes and Barsac wines together. Broustet has been quietly improving in quality for a number of years, and the finesse really shows. Sigalas-Rabaud has style and a very complete, dense feel, while Tanners stalwart Doisy-Daëne is classy with balance and poise. 

Our other favourites include Coutet, Bastor-Lamontagne, Rayne-Vigneau and the high flying Lafaurie-Peyraguey. Rieussec, completely rebranded away from its traditional label, proudly announces its sugar level at a whopping 155 gm/l, but wears it well. Nairac and Doisy-Védrines have both made very good, dense wines too.