How historical hierarchies are inside our brains

Last monday, we had a very special GJE session in Paris where Reignac, a simple “Bordeaux Supérieur” was tasted blind inside the following names :

All first growths
+
LMHB, Angelus, Cheval-Blanc, Ausone, Petrus.

You may know that in the tasted vintage 2001, Reignac reaches level 2, just after Angelus and before every other names. Fine : this was discussed at lenght here and there. Wilfred and Kevin Shin were there. All the session was under scrutiny of a legal entity (Huissier in France) and 100 % recorded for a DVD, including debriefings and writing the scores under our usual excel spreadsheet.

On this post, I just want to discuss 3 other points.

First subject of discussion.

If Reignac was the last one, nobody would even care and will find that normal, whatever the Reignac’ score in points would have been. I mean, I cannot imagine anyone writing : hey, guys, we have a problem here ! IMO Reignac 2001 is superior to… !

But when a simple Reignac beats the big guns, then this is a kind of earthquake in our mind since we simply do not like (at various levels, of course) that our preferred personnal hierarchy, built over the official one for the vast majority of us, is on fire.

Second subject of discussion :

Why do we accept more easily to integrate in our pantheon new names in Burgundy or Rhône or Alsace than we do for Bordeaux ? I have numerous examples in mind of young producers who are fully respected as the very best names while they were not producers just 20 years ago (or just starting).
Why it is more difficult for us (and, trust me, I am inside this group) to accept the fact that new producers in Bordeaux areas, such as Jean Guyon (Rollan de By, Haut-Condissas), Yves Vatelot (Reignac, Baltus), Droulers (Haut-Carles) may be able to find some good terroirs, to work hard like hell on those terroirs, to spent substantial amount of money to make the best possible, why these new Producers are not considered not at the level, but “close to” the big historical names ?
After all, in 1855 only a tiny part of Bordeaux was under vines and certainly the properties were dispatched near roads and rivers (easy transportation) and not always according some geological survey ?
Well : you will tell me some exceptions to that like Thunevin on Valandraud. Thanks first to Michel Bettane and then Robert Parker, this property was put under the radar and Thunevin was able to collect a very good financial value for his wine. At a more discret level, François Mitjavile on Tertre Roteboeuf.

Third subject of discussion :

“Well, OK Reignac had the chance of its life, but, you will see, in 5 or 10 years from now, the wine will get back in the anonymous basket”

You are probably right, though I am the kind of guy who want to wait and see. This lunch, I did open a médoc 1985 “Les Ormes Sorbet” from Jean Boivert. This wine has 24 years. Trust me or not : I have tasted many classified, many times from this vintage, and they just do not come closed to this cru that I discover thru Bertrand Le Guern (see his huge statistical analysis at : Bertand Le Guern" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;). Jean Boivert was an exceptionnal winemaker.

So, do not consider me as a destructor of the classified. Most of them are truly gems from Bordeaux areas. But I just cannot find any arguments under which it is a crime to compare a simple new wine, well done, with them ? And if it cames well out of the tasting, inside the GJE system, I just can say :

“15 top tasters cannot make the same mistake, the very sm day, on the same wine”

This si something a free brain is able to understand !

Francois, I think to a lot of us there is an “ironclad simplicity” to the 1855 classification that causes us to raise our eyebrows whenever something like the Reignac happens. I think it is inarguable that for all it’s faults, it is the most established, widely-understood, thoroughly debated and time-tested wine classification in the world, and so I think inherently that people tend to just look at Bordeaux, even if only subconsciously, through it’s lens.

My two cents.

Francois, welcome and thanks for starting what will likely turn-out to be an interesting discussion topic.

Fwiw, I had the 2001 Reignac just a few weeks ago and it definitely was a PUME.

“Very nice nose, with lots of classic Bordeaux scents – oak with graphite, leather, and vanilla. However, while the classic graphite and leather flavors also carried-through to the palate, the wine was ultimately rather austere, with a lean midpalate and short finish. Not all that exciting…”

I recall it performing much better in the past.

Addition: I forgot to mention that I realize that the tasting note doesn’t seem very typical for a St Emilion like Reignac – the profile reads much more like a left than right bank wine, and not an exceptional one at that. If it’s indicative, we had another Bordeaux that evening (I can’t recall exactly which, I believe it was a '98 from the Medoc) that was much more enjoyable.

Thanks, François. The 01 Reignac has been one of my go to wines over the past few years. Love it. Here’s a recent TN:

• 2001 Reignac - France, Bordeaux, Bordeaux Supérieur (5/2/2009)
  Deep ruby color. This is still very youthful; lots of mocha, allspice and black currant flavors, medium bodied with good acidity. (91 pts.)

Posted from CellarTracker

I have no idea where I’d rank it blind against the ‘big guns’ of Bordeaux, but for a simple dinner it’s great.

I have been disappointed in a number of the 2001 first growths (I much prefer the vintage in Pomerol) and I have never had Reignac - so I certainly can’t comment on this result specifically, but these are the questions that come to my mind along with the point about maturity which you’ve already addressed (color me skeptical that the same result obtains with a horizontal of '59s!).

1. Do you think comparing a Bordeaux Superieur to first growths is an apples-to-apples comparison? By which I mean, I fully accept that in many situations a Bordeaux Superieur is the wine that’s called for and offers more pleasure than a first growth. But that does not mean the two types offer the same kind of pleasure.

2. If the comparison really is an apples-to-apples comparison and the Bordeaux Superieur beats a good example of a first growth on all of the criteria in which a first growth is supposed to excel, to what would you attribute it? The first growths are certainly understood to (i) come from top-notch terroir and (ii) reflect careful, spare-no-expense winemaking. So if a Bordeaux Superieur is superior (rather than just excellent in its own way), I see only three possible explanations why:
   (i) the Bordeaux Superieur comes from a top-notch terroir every bit the quality of a first growth but which has not hitherto been discovered;
   (ii) the Bordeaux Superieur is made with the same careful, spare-no-expense winemaking as the first growth – and it turns out great wines really are made in the winery and not the vineyard;
   (iii) the Bordeaux Superieur lacks both the quality of the terroir and the quality of the winemaking of the first growth – and it turns out that we’ve all been deluding ourselves that either one of them makes a difference and all the assumptions on which our little wine-appreciation hobby has been based are total BS… everyone who has claimed a transcendental experience with a first growth or grand cru Burgundy has been a deluded label drinker.
   Of the three possible explanations, I guess (i) is the most likely of the three, but if that’s the case I would honestly expect that truth to be revealed in the form of dozens of notes of people exclaiming “Unbelievable! This is first growth quality!” rather than the surprise results of a particular blind tasting. And I honestly can’t think of an option (iv).

Keith :

Besides GJE, who is organizing these kinds of tastings ? This a a big share of the answer.

But again, as explained many times, I belong also to the category of amateurs who give many points to a first growth, just because he is, full label open, on the table.

An other point : while this kind of tastings, finally, is easy to be done in Bordeaux, even with you at one of the tasting tables, I have serious doubt that any "villages AOC may beat so easily a “grand cru” in Burgundy.

Kevin Shin has written an intelligent post on the “other” BB : in nowdays, it is quite impossible to find differences between left bank and right bank.

And Jürgen Steinke has explained also many times how it is difficult for our limited brains to accept that a prestigious name is beaten by a vulgar unknown wine (well, not anymore now).

This kind of subject will certainly come back regularly.

Best to all,

C’mon, Keith, that’s easy:

(iv) the 1855 classification wasn’t directly based on quality of terroir or wine. It was based on reputation above all else. Yes, we might infer high quality wines from this fact of high reputation, or, we might infer a few other things, such as ties of friendship and commerce (remembering these were wine brokers doing the ranking), a very limited range of wineries considered, and no actual comparison tasting. In light of this, it is not only easy to imagine non-classed crus equalling or surpassing the classed ones, but to be expected.

Posted by Chaad Thomas:

C’mon, Keith, that’s easy:

(iv) the 1855 classification wasn’t directly based on quality of terroir or wine. It was based on reputation above all else. Yes, we might infer high quality wines from this fact of high reputation, or, we might infer a few other things, such as ties of friendship and commerce (remembering these were wine brokers doing the ranking), a very limited range of wineries considered, and > no actual comparison tasting> . In light of this, it is not only easy to imagine non-classed crus equalling or surpassing the classed ones, but to be expected.

FWIW, this probably isn’t entirely accurate for several reasons.

1. Some but not all of the wines apparently were tasted (see link below).

http://dat.erobertparker.com/bboard/showthread.php?p=2565306&highlight=1855+hermitage#post2565306" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

2. Around then, according to Livingston-Learmonth and others, the wealthier Bdx. outfits were routinely “doctoring” their wines with Hermitage and juice from elsewhere.

Chaad, that’s not an option (iv), it’s just another way of saying what I listed as option (i). Also, we weren’t talking about non-classified crus surpassing classified ones in general - we were talking about their surpassing the first growths specifically. Whatever you may think about the staying power or methodology of the entire 1855 hierarchy, nobody can seriously suggest that the first growths got their spots as a fluke and might well have been unclassified under a fairer ranking method.

Well, this certainly opens up the question of what actually is great terroir and whether tradition/history is always correct. Is there really THAT much difference in terroir among the chateaus? If one could devote the same resources that the First Growths have at their disposal, how great can someone make a wine?

I don’t know, but in terms of taste alone, color me skeptical about the hierarchy being very exact at all.

I think we will have a better idea of the answers when the recent wines of Pontet Canet, Cos, and Ducru Beaucaillou (just to name a few) mature and are tasted blind against the supposed great wines of their respective vintages. If their relative scoring remains the same as today (very high), then I think we have some of our answers.

Kudos to the GJE for doing tastings like this! Keep up the fine work, Francois!

(iv.) Mssr Mauss’ discovery however fruitful it is in dispeling the aura of labels is confined to a structured tasting which is limited in its ability to make generalizations about wine:

1. Because in said tastings, the evolution and individuality of a wine can often be swept under the rigors of repeated side-by-side tastings. I can only comment based upon my own experience in such tastings, but I don’t believe a full picture of a wine can be made by that or even by tasting a wine for 15 minutes. To truly understand a wine, several bottles will have to be consumed at various stages of its life, over a large period of time. Imagine a sine curve. At any given tasting, you can find the tangent of the wine’s evolution on the curve. Without multiple data points, you are going to be woefully off course in terms of finding a representative average line.

Accordingly, different wines will be in different phases of their curve of evolution, making cross-vintage comparisons, again, very difficult at an arbitrary age (e.g. 5-6 years past bottling). If this tasting were conducted every 2 years for a decade, with complimentary tastings of smaller samples of bottles in a dinner setting where thought and reflection can be further expanded, I think we will have a clearer picture of said wines.

Regardless, we are constantly appreciative of the GJE’s efforts in examining and challenging institutional hierarchies. Many thanks Francois!

What your reasoning doesn’t account for is that the first growths made their reputation long before they devoted any special resources to their production beyond what anyone else was doing. Most did not modernize their production methods until the 1980s or even later. While I don’t think many people would argue that Bordeaux has the precise terroir definition of Burgundy (or that Bordeaux grapes are as terroir-transparent as pinot), the terroirs of the first growths have been studied extensively and it’s been clearly shown what makes them special.

There are plenty of producers these days willing and able to devote at least as much resources and attention to their winemaking as the first growths. If the results are sometimes first-growth quality (and certainly first-growth quality results have been achieved by others without any above-and-beyond resources devoted to the winemaking!), I think the candidates most people would mention are themselves made by highly ranked classified growths. A Bordeaux Superieur reaching that level would be a man-bites-dog story to say the least. In any event, it wouldn’t make sense to conclude that terroir doesn’t make a difference. Terroir will always give an advantage either in terms of consistency / repeat performances or of reaching the highest highs.

Faryan :

You did made absolutly valid points. But, beneath these results, it was 2 main questions :

a : obviously, if the same tasting was done at non-blind, even inside the GJE top, they would never give such high ranking for Reignac : WHY ???

b : why, in our brains, whatever may be the demonstrations of blind tastings, why a piece of land, unknown to vines in 1855, will not be able in 2009 to produce top wines ?

The 1855 list was old news and long accepted before any of us were ever born. Heck, before our grandparents were born it was old news.

It is difficult to throw off something that is that classic. We can update it, change it, even ridicule it or ignore it, but the point is that we will all refer to that because that is what you learn first. It is the historical champ.

Ask any baseball fan here, and Babe Ruth will come up in a discussion of the greatest ball player ever. Yet, no one person here ever saw him play. As time goes on, his reputation will only continue to grow. Historical precedents tend to become more ‘written in stone’ over time.

Francois,

The myth of the label is indeed rectified by such a tasting. I think it is absolutely wonderful that the likes of Reignac, Grand Chenes and Haut Condissas perform well in these functions. If anything, the consumer must take more responsibility with regards to drinking blind if he or she wishes to be objective in their purchasing and consumption.

However, we all know that human beings are very often not objective (as you so dutifuly stated) and the veritable fact that they are buying prestige and expense will heighten their pleasure, then you can only tip your cap and hope they enjoy the ride!

FWIW, I will seek out the 01 Reignac. The 05 is definitely on my spectrum of wines to try.

Keith,

You bring up some very thoughtful points and let me clarify my direction. I was not suggesting terroir is irrelevant, but rather there may be some other “near first growth” quality terroir in Bordeaux that has only recently begun to be exploited to its full potential.

What if, prior to 1855, other chateau did not have the resources or desire to fully exploit their potential and were really just making nice tasting alcoholic grape juice? Then, they get slotted in wherever and the subsequent owners were happy making wine and making a living going through the motions. Then, someone gets the property and devotes modern knowledge, techniques, and money to maximize the land and the wine making. That could be what we are witnessing.

Now, as you discuss, a Bordeaux superior living in the realm of First Growths would be more dramatic than what I am suggesting and I would be skeptical if it could be done on a consistent basis.

It really is a fascinating topic. Had I not had a history of participating in blind (GJE) tastings, I would probably write a post extolling the virtues of the established hierarchy.

But, having participated in these tastings, that’s not the post I’m writing. The blind tasting really does put the wines on a level playing field, and woa–look what happens! A $15 wine shoots past a $1250 wine?! How does such a thing happen?

Yes, yes, yes, I know. The First Growths are the top, and of course, I agree with all their virtues. I consider it a privilege to drink them whenever I have the opportunity, and it is always a delight. The 1990 Latour about which I posted was as good a wine as I’ve had. Stupendous. The surprise isn’t that the First Growths are good; the surprise is that some “lowly” wines that do not have the benefit of the label, when given equal opportunity with the big boys, show well too.

Why is this hard to accept? Cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance means that one cannot hold two incompatible ideas at the same time. An example is “I enjoy smoking” and “Smoking can kill you.” But wait–I can’t “enjoy” something that will kill me. The only way to resolve these incompatible ideas is to reconcile them. I might then say, “Well, I don’t believe the research” or “I don’t have a history of cancer in my family, so I’m pretty much immune.”

In the world of wine, we have this too. How can a lowly $15 wine compare favorably with a $400 FG? Answers abound–“Blind tasting is flawed.” Or “15 minutes with a wine doesn’t really tell the story.” (It doesn’t; but it doesn’t seem to stop people from following Parker and other critics who usually spend a lot less time than 15 minutes evaluating and rating a wine). Or “It was a fluke; silly things happen. People make mistakes.” I’ve often said that any professional wine critic whose ratings don’t more or less line up with the 1855 classification would not be taken seriously. As some of the writers and editors from the Wine Spectator have pointed out, its interesting how orderly are most critics’ ratings when it comes to Bordeaux wines and the 1855 classification. And when a taster doesn’t rate a FG as high as a “lesser” wine, its universally chalked up as a “mistake” on the part of the taster, rather than the “lesser” wine perhaps being superior on that day to a “superior” wine. The assumption often is “what’s wrong with the taster that he/she didn’t rate the FG higher.”

I invite skeptics to do what Kevin Shin has done in Washington, DC–they do regular blind tastings to see how various wines line up against each other. And don’t just do current vintages–a few years ago we (GJE) did a blind tasting of 1985 Bordeaux as well as Italy. Try it–when you extol the virtues of a wine only to find out its a wine like Reignac will you come to this broader perspective.

But Keith is right, too–the FG’s are great, by and large, and they are great for a reason. There’s no real dispute about that. But the point is that other wines, surprisingly, can be pretty great, too, in their own way. Get the DVD (when its released) and watch Kevin extol the virtues of his favorite blind wine that morning–Reignac. Others, too–a lot of people at the tasting went on record with similar comments. Then you’ll see what I mean.

Cognitive dissonance only occurs when one views a classification as rigid and completely deterministic.

I have always seen the 1855 (and even Burgundy) classifications as representing statistical tendencies. In crude terms, a 1st Growth will be superior to in 8 or 9 / 10 vintages. Statistically speaking, it is not at all improbably that an ‘unknown’ will be better than many or all the 1st Growths in a particular vintage. The hierarchy only need be amended if that ‘unknown’ starts beating the odds more often.

Most subtly, a 1st Growth (or Grand Cru in Burgundy, for example) represents a range of merit whose average* will be higher than a 2nd growth (or 1er Cru). The ranges may overlap, but the 1st/Grand will have a higher bound as well. Obviously winemaking ability with respect to understanding the specific terroir plays a substantial role in the bounds, but I would submit not so much in the average*.

What gets really interesting is when you have terroirs which are especially volatile meaning whose range is large. Clos Vougeot is like that and the interesting question is if it is from a lack of precision or from an inherent volatility. If you follow the RP rating, Beausejour-whatever-1990 is a classic case (I was wholly unimpressed by it, btw) where the range of the terroir may indeed be huge.

That leads to the real nut - what is Reignac? (I’ve had it, never made notes, but do remember really enjoying a whole bottle with delivery pizza when stuck in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere.) Is the '01 a statistical anomaly? Is it a terroir whose range is broad, but whose average is low? I think those are questions which only time can answer.

A.

• If I think about it, the median occurs to me to be more meaningful here. A highly volatile wine could give a relatively high average, but more indicative of quality would be a measure of consistency like the median.

Good points, Andrew. Agreed; to say Reignac deserves to be there on a regular basis, it would need to be shown that it consistently is there.

I think the point Francois is making is that people tend to dismiss a more “minor cru” because it lacks the label, even if it is shown in blind tastings to appear to compete ably with the big boys in a particular vintage. But if we want to represent this is consistently true of Reignac, then yes, it would need to be demonstrated over repeated vintages. That’s wasn’t exactly my sense of Francois’ point, though.

Re cognitive dissonance–I don’t think we need to qualify it. As a psychologist, the definition I’ve always used (and see in the field) is holding two incompatible beliefs at the same time.

Just my $.02 though…I’m open to learning alternative thoughts!

Andrew : of course, in the long run, the first are truly outstanding wines, nobody may contest this fact.

But, to go in your way, you give me an idea of tasting :

a : I take a decade which, without any discussion, is ready to drink : the 80’
b : for every year, I take every first growths
c : for every year, I take Sociando-Mallet, a simple basci “cru bourgeois” at that time

We add all the results. Blind. 15 to tasters. I bet a La Tâche that Sociando will not be the last one… as it should be on paper !