Last week, Art of Cellaring (Houston’s finest wine shop/storage facility/wine school) put on its second annual 10-year Bordeaux retrospective (which I have lovingly dubbed “Southwold on the Bayou”). I know @RyanC was in attendance, if there were any other local Berserkers please tag in and share any thoughts.
This was my first real exposure to any material number of Bordeaux 2015s, as I was not paying attention to wine when they were released and have focused on 16 and 19 as backfill opportunities in the few recent years I’ve started paying attention and building a collection. I love that the shop has started putting these 10-year events on as it is a great opportunity to get a representative look at vintages that are at that midpoint where there is still some availability in the market, but the wines aren’t impossibly far from their drinking window (as it can feel on original release).
Brandon Kerne MS led around 30 attendees through a multi-hour, five-flight seated tasting featuring one full-blind flight and then four regional-focus flights poured nonblind. We tasted 18 wines in all. Brandon and the AOC team sourced the wines (I think mostly ex-chateau?) over the course of the past year, and he explained that they selected the specific wines and flights in an effort to tell the story of the vintage in the context of evolving trends in Bordeaux – the collision of a hot vintage with the tail end of the Parker era, with some chateaux still leaning into mid-2000s more-is-more and others starting to take their foot off the gas.
General Thoughts
It will come as no surprise that the contrast to the 2014 vintage tasting the year before was absolutely stark. Marathon tasting each vintage came with its own challenges. The 14s were very acidic and very tannic at the 10-year mark and some of the wines were fairly backward/closed; as a result it could be tough to get a read on the wines just due to the accumulated effect of tasting a bunch of tannic wines in succession. The 15s posed basically the opposite problem. The wines were almost uniformly open (though still pretty primary) but the hot vintage made for some pretty heavy going on some of the flights, with some wines showing very high alcohols, low acidities, and general weight contributing to a sense of fatigue.
Although I did not love the vintage on the whole after tasting through the examples offered—and still think 16 and 19 (and selected 14s) are the vintages to focus on for me—there were several wines that I’d be affirmatively glad to drink if put in front of me. The twin highlights of the tasting for me were Leoville-Barton and D’Issan, both of which stood out due to the fact that they were able to retain a fresh acid and mineral structure (and in the case of D’Issan some refreshing herbaceous/green pepper/green olive pyrazine character) from which to hang the ripe fruit that is the vintage hallmark. Immediately below those two were Brane-Cantenac and Haut-Bailly, both of which were just a tick behind the first pair in perceived acidity and freshness but which both maintained impeccable balance nonetheless. A bigger gap down to fifth place, but I also quite enjoyed Rauzan-Segla. Other than acidity/freshness, the common thread for the four wines I particularly enjoyed was that they all retained some savory character that was lacking in many of the others.
By contrast, the right bank was Not For Me. I found the right bank wines, on average, unpleasant, with minor exceptions for Canon and Conseillante (neither of which I especially enjoyed, but at least would have considered keeping if offered to trade my glass for a cold High Life). I am perfectly fine with high alcohol and ripe fruit – zin was my first love – if the wine has fresh acidity to balance things out, but I found these just absolutely fell flat on that score. Wine after wine showed sweet, ultra-ripe dark fruit with low acidity that offered nothing in the way of refreshment and made for flat and fatiguing wines. I am very open to the possibility that these are going to show better in another 10-15 years once the primary fruit recedes a little, but the acid levels are a big question mark. (The distance between the critical evaluations and my own thoughts also makes me wonder if this is a “me problem” and if I revisited some of the wines on a single-bottle basis with more time to spend with it I’d like them better.)
I’ll post my notes on the specific wines below as I finish typing up each flight – big grain of salt on these, please, as I am simply not that experienced of a taster in any arena and certainly not in Bordeaux, plus I find it pretty tough to accurately evaluate wine in large tastings. Nonetheless I find it useful to take rough notes and write them up because it forces me to be analytical about the wines as opposed to merely hitting a thumbs up-thumbs down. I was spitting a good amount but not all of the wine and so unsurprisingly the detail in my handwritten notes goes down over time as conversation at the table picked up and my analytical mind was suffused with benevolent good cheer, etc. etc.
