Happy New Year to all of you! I trust your festivities were successful, with loads of great wines. I had the usual mixture of delights and disasters - the unpredictability is why wine is fun. I’ve posted about most of the good ones already, but not this one. I decided to just update my post about Du Glana 2000 rather than start a new one.
Du Glana - Cru Bourgeois Saint Julien 2003
Like most 2003s tasted this year, this one started badly, with pinched aromas and pinched, burnt flavours. It needed a couple of hours in a decanter to come out of its shell. The nose was then much more expressive, with brambly fruit aromas mixed with spices and herbs, leading into a rich attack of red cherry and redcurrant, then a very deep middle section leaning more towards blackberry, and a long, satisfying finish. Difficult to choose between this and the 2000. 91 pts
We tasted this alongside a Clos du Marquis 2003 that a friend brought along. No geeky blind tasting, just glasses of each wine served with dinner. At first, the Clos du Marquis dominated, but as the evening went on, so the Du Glana pulled away, with much better depth and fruit. The CDM tasted similar, but with less of everything. The only superior aspect of the CDM was the silky finish, which showed up a very slight coarseness in the Du Glana’s aftertaste.
I wasn’t particularly surprised that the Du Glana fared so well, simply because we had had the 00 in May, but needless to say our friends were.
It’s always fun to taste a wine alongside another and it puts things into perspective - it’s very easy to get carried away with a bargain find like this one, but it really is good. There are literally dozens of CCs which produced worse wines in 2003 and even in St.Julien, I would say it is better than Branaire or Lagrange, for example. In fact I enjoyed it more than the Léoville Barton we had recently. Sadly, it was our last bottle and I’m unlikely to find any more, since the last time it was seen at auction here was in 2014!
Of course the big difference between Du Glana and the others is its price - at 8 euros, the 03 was even cheaper than the 00!
Anyway, like the 2000, this is one to look out for at auction, since it is probably only worth around 20 euros.