Wine 1980 | The 1980 Vintage Guide for French Wines

Visit vintage 1980 is a year close to your heart? Is it a birth year, a wedding year or some other symbolic year that makes you want to offer or drink a wine from this year? We're here to help you decipher this vintage and find the right wine for you. order the 1980 bottle that best suits your needs.

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• Vintage 1980 in BORDEAUX

The Bordeaux vineyards had two faces in this vintage, due to inclement weather. For red wines, it was a difficult vintage. Firstly, because the summer 1980 was cold and wet. Flowering also encountered some difficulties with rain in June. Fortunately, treatments made up for this, avoiding too much run-off and sparing the grapes from as much rot as possible. This also gave the winemakers precious time to wait for the weather to improve. The presence of sunshine in the vineyards at the end of September offered a glimmer of hope to winegrowers, some of whom were able to limit the damage. However, rain reappeared after a sunny first fortnight of October, which finished off the last winegrowers who had not yet harvested. As is often the case with complicated, rainy vintages, it was the vineyards with good drainage that fared best. 

Here are a few success stories: 

• Margaux wines from 1980
• Les Saint-Julien 1980 vintage
• Pauillac on the 1980 vintage
• Pessac Léognan wines in 1980

These wines will be richer and more aromatic, whereas heavier vineyards will lack substance and consistency. The second face of Bordeaux's vineyards is golden white. This is because the grapes ripened late, and some estates managed to harvest until the end of November in the Sauternes and Barsac terroirs, providing excellent conditions for the winemakers to produce wines of the highest quality. Rich, ripe and intense. The 1980 wines not enjoying a good reputation, the whites of Sauternes or Barsac are still very good value for money.

 

• Vintage 1980 in BOURGOGNE

Visit Burgundy wines from 1980 were not spared by this difficult weather either. The whole vine chronology suffered a slight delay. It began in the spring with late leafing, followed by staggered and uneven flowering. June was cold and rainy, but August and September saw above-average temperatures. Rainfall just before or at harvest time led to the development of rot. As a result, winegrowers had to sort the grapes more carefully, and in some cases, yields were very low. Côte-de-Nuits red wines are faring a little better than their Côte-de-Beaune neighbors to the south, and although the red wines are better than their reputation would suggest, they are still light, fruity and relatively supple. On the vintage 1980one wine stood out from the crowd: the La Tache de la Romanée ContiA great success for the property. As for the 1980 vintage white winesThese are in line with an average vintage. With the months of June and July very cold and wet, flowering lasted twice as long as expected, resulting in poor berry development. August and September were sunny, but less so than on the Côte-de-Nuits. With these particular climatic conditions, the Chablisien is faring better than the rest of the white wines. The addition of acidity and freshness gives it better ageing potential than Beaune wines. Generally speaking, white wines should be drunk fairly quickly to avoid an imbalance between substance and acidity on the palate.

 

• Vintage 1980 in VALLEE DU RHÔNE

As is often the case when a vintage is complicated in Bordeaux due to inclement weather and a lack of sunshine, the Rhône Valley wines from 1980 are more balanced and supple. The vintage is somewhat underestimated in the region, offering mature wines with a racy character. In fact, this is the appellation Côte-Rôtie that the second great success of the vintage was produced. It is the Côte-Rôtie La Mouline de la Guigal house. With its rich aromas, it was able to absorb the wood ageing to restore it to the wine and give it concentration. On a more general note, 1980 was a very abundant vintage, surely the most voluminous of the last twenty years, due to rainfall just before the harvest. The quality of this year's wines was average, but consistent, with wines that were fruitier and rounder than usual. The same is true of the white wines. The vintage was of average quality, and the beginning of the vine cycle was, as in Bordeaux, rather tricky to manage, long and irregular. It reached its end several days late. Then the sun and warmth settled in, both in the northern and southern parts of the vineyard, enabling the grapes to reach good ripeness and produce very good yields. The majority of white appellations fared rather well, with fruity, round whites with good acidity. One white appellation stands out from the crowd: AOC Châteauneuf du Pape. The wines are rich and opulent, with mineral and herbaceous notes. Medium-ageing, the wines should be drunk within a few years.

 

• Vintage 1980 in the REST OF FRANCE

The rest of France's wine-growing region experienced a rather disparate harvest and vintage. Although not the vintage of the century, some regions enjoyed good harvests. Such is the case of Champagne which, despite low yields, benefited from healthy harvests and produced vinous champagnes with good acidity levels, giving them good ageing potential. In the Loire, the quality was not there. Rain at harvest time soaked the grapes with water, resulting in a loss of concentration and a more diluted wine. The only consolation was that the volume harvested was higher than usual. On the other hand, the vintage will be remembered by Alsace winegrowers, but not for the right reasons. Rain and cold made for an appalling harvest, resulting in wines that were too light and less dense. A vintage to forget for Alsatians.

 

The best wine of the 1980 vintage

According to the tasters, here is the finest bottle and the greatest success of the 1980 vintage for French wines: La Romanée Conti "La Tâche" from 1980 with a superb 99 Parker points. Here are the tasting notes:

• 99/100 Parker
• Ageing potential: 2010 - 2040
• Tasting and vintage note by William Kelley in 2021: "The "La Tâche Grand Cru 1980″ is an extraordinary wine at the height of its powers. It unfolds in the glass with exotic aromas of wilted rose petals, raspberries and cherries mingled with exotic spices, evergreens, blood orange, smoky tea and game birds. It's full-bodied, velvety and sensual, with a deep, multidimensional core, rich, powdery tannins and lively acidity, and finishes with a long, perfumed finish. From a bottle that has never left Burgundy, this is a profound wine that I see as the stylistic successor to the stunning 1962. Interestingly, in 1980, Aubert de Villaine observed that all Domaine de la Romanée-Conti wines were bottled directly from the barrel, without any racking."

 

Did you enjoy reading this 1980 guide? You can find the best wines of 1980 on the site. We advise you to choose a bottle of 1980 wine with a level consistent with its age. The 1980 wine labels are often slightly stained or damaged (but this is normal for an old vintage). Thank you for reading. Visit the greatest wines of 1980 on Comptoir des Millésimes :

> The best wines in stock from the 1980 vintage