Last night, our monthly blind group took a look at an oft-ignored set of wines: dry white bordeaux
Going into it, everyone commented that we were tasting more (8) white bordeauxs than most of us had drank in years
Coming out of it, everyone joked that we now understood why we never bought white bordeauxs.
The wines, from a wide range of producers, recent vintages (2009-2013) and price points, were consistently mediocre and poor QPR. Our “winner” (our voting was so scattered as to reflect little more than random chance) was the cheapest bottle, the Chateau Graville Lacoste. It was by fair the palest of the bunch, showed no oak influence, showed no evidence of it’s dose of Semillon and, frankly, was a dead ringer for cheap NZ sauvignon blanc with it’s grassy nose and pineapple / tropical fruit. It stood out from the group, but no one thought it was great QPR. Cheap, middlingly decent SB is a dime a dozen.
My favorite, which the group had “sixth” (really a de facto tie with four or five other wines) was the most expensive bottle, the Domaine de Chevalier. This had oodles and oodles of high quality oak, and a very faintly oxidative character that brought out the honeyed notes from the Semillon. It was reasonably long, but not extraordinarily so. I noted it as “a cheap date”. It was pretty good - I’d buy this wine at $30. It was not $30.
For me, at least, the most interesting wine at the tasting was one I’ve had before and recognized - the Chateau Carbonnieux. This was one of the few wines that didn’t show strongly as sauvignon blanc or semillon (or perhaps more accurately, reductive or oxidative); it had a little bit of funk in the nose but the palate was long, lemony and finished with chalky extraction. Not bad, not super oaky, and $30ish, which isn’t obscene. I wouldn’t seek out but I wouldn’t kick out of bed, either.
But generally, the more expensive bottles were very oaky and sweet, and the cheaper bottles were grassy and anonymous, and this is not a category I will be visiting again, not at these prices. Tons more value in white burgundy. Hell, there is tons more value in muscadet, and I don’t particularly like muscadet.