The best of Bordeaux

Another year, another difficult decision to make on whether to buy the fledgling Bordeaux wines. This time it's the 2014 vintage; a year that Pierre Seillan at Château Lassegue in Saint-Emilion described as "crazy".

"In 48 years of making wine, I have never seen such a spectacular reversal of fortunes as in 2014," he says.

What he means is that after a dismal July and August, the skies cleared and there were two months of uninterrupted sunshine, allowing the grapes, at the very least, a fighting chance of turning into high-quality wines.

The 2014 vintage has a few characteristics you should know about before deciding whether to buy - either now during the en primeur season, or in a few years when the wines are in bottle.

First, even with the September and October sunshine, the quality of the fruit has remained on the fresh scale because by the time the sun made its appearance, the heat that it brings in July and August had dissipated somewhat, and the nights had turned cooler. In most cases the grapes have ripened fully - particularly the cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc, which love a slow ripening season. But there are no cooked aromas in 2014, so expect plum, damsons and cherries rather than figs or prunes. At the same time, the sunshine was sufficiently prolonged so that in the best properties the tannins are soft and approachable.

At the same time, high acidity is a feature in both reds and whites. Again, this is a direct result of the weather, as the malic acid naturally present in grapes tends to get zapped by summer sunshine in normal years. The rainy August in 2014 meant that by the end of the month the malic levels were still very high, so you're going to find plenty of wines that have a real skip in their step. Producers on dry gravelly soils have done best, as have those who reduced the number of grapes halfway through the season, leaving the rest of the crop to concentrate and ripen fully. Some cooler clay soils, or those who left yields high seem to have fairly meagre wines where the acidity hasn't dropped low enough to be palatable.