Rain. It started last night at dinner – we were unprepared and got mercilessly drenched on the walk home. This morning is a little better, in a drizzly, foggy sort of way. The new tour bus game is spotting vineyard workers rising eerily from the mist as we drive past.

Another trek to the northern extremities of the Medoc, and first stop Ducru-Beaucaillou. Well-made wine but it didn’t set my pulse racing. A wry vintage assessment from Bruno Borie, entitled “2013: Classicism reinvented!” is a nice piece of subversive PR, which he clearly enjoyed writing. As is his throwaway lament that whilst “certain journalists” have decided not to attend the en primeur tastings this year, they have still somehow managed to form negative quality impressions of the vintage. I feel he may have a point.

Next the trio of top St Estephes: Montrose, Calon-Segur and Cos d’Estournel. Montrose was polished, lithe, savoury – very complete. Calon-Segur, which as a property has been totally modernised since the Madame Capbern-Gasqueton days and is due to open a new winery in 2016, was a supple incarnation of its usual muscular self. Cos was perhaps the greatest surprise – a very modest 12.7% alcohol and a truly lovely melange of rose petals and saline minerality, encased in a fine tannic lattice. Tasting at Cos is a little like being in an exclusive but rather surreal nightclub, all dark walls, low lighting and expensive artwork. Oh, and elephant sculptures, elephant shrubbery, elephant light installations…they love a good elephant here.

The inevitable timetabling glitch was spotted in the nick of time, but meant that our scheduled lunch had to be hurriedly abandoned to allow for a dash over to the right bank. A personal disaster, as I had failed to make my DIY sandwich this morning due to increased vigilance in the hotel breakfast room. Maybe they have rumbled us after all – knew I shouldn’t have written about it yesterday, the hotel staff are clearly reading these posts.

After a rainy drive round the estuary and up the other side, we got stuck into the melee of the Union de Grands Crus tastings, first St Emilion and then the smaller Pomerol tasting, at which we finally caught the tail end of lunch. There was some massive extraction on the right bank – you just can’t make this style of blockbusting wine when the fruit isn’t there. Some wines were so woody they were difficult to spit, the oak tannins seeming to suck the liquid back into your mouth. Clinet and Gazin were both over performers, the latter being the focus of today’s pricing gossip, with a symbolic €1 drop in the release price compared to last year.

We then raced back over the river to negociant house Joanne, which is an Aladdin’s cave of wine, where classed growth claret is literally stacked ceiling high. Like I imagine a private shopping experience to be, you sit regally in a tasting room and can order up pretty much any wine you desire from the cavernous expanse of warehouse that surrounds you. We tasted solidly for over four hours – back over wines we have tasted in the previous days, and some new ones. There were a few team tasting notes which merited recording, such as “it’s unusual for a wine to smell of ink AND bananas” and “WHERE did they get that smell from?” Spontaneaous Latin phrase of the day was Mr Fraser’s inspired sic biscuit est disintegrans – that’s the way the cookie crumbles. (We await confirmation of the exact syntax).

The final stop of the day was dinner at Chateau Les Carmes Haut-Brion. We offered profuse apologies for our lateness, and were treated to an awe-inspiring blind line-up of wines, including Lalou de Bize Leroy’s Mazis-Chambertin 2000, Armand Rousseau’s Charmes-Chambertin 1981, and wines from our hosts’ chateaux – La Conseillante 1970 and, amazingly, a pristine magnum of Les Carmes Haut-Brion 1949.

But so much for 1949. This is about 2013, and I will end with a warning from Bruno Borie’s vintage report. “The temptation was great to try to remedy the deficiencies of Mother Nature via an unbridled interventionism during vinification. No way, fat chance!”*

*Borie also wisely notes that “preparing the vintage press kit is a pretty vain exercise. It will most likely finish up… without ever having been read, in the next door chateau’s garbage”. Not all of them, Bruno.