Last Thursday night was the third installment of Art of Cellaring’s excellent “10 Years On” event, a ticketed tasting loosely modeled on the Southwold tasting. Once again, Brandon Kerne MS and the team put on a phenomenal show, sourcing a slate of excellent wines ranging from the “attainable middle” to the “special-occasion upper middle” of the 2016 grands crus. Brandon’s slideshow and commentary on the vintage and the chateaux was, as ever, insightful and illuminating, and the 35-odd guests received excellent wine service from AOC’s team of somms.
@RyanC made it for the back half of the tasting, and it was great to catch up with him. Hope he’ll chime in on the St Julien flight onward. And, in a very small-world moment, it turned out that the gentleman across from me who I had been chatting with all night was @R.Condron’s dad (who, like son, is great company and a very careful and insightful taster – helps explain why Robert has such a sharp palate despite his relative youth!)
We tasted a total of 21 wines over five flights. The flights were presented single-blind, i.e. we knew what wines were in the flight but did not know which wine was in each glass. This was a welcome return to the format – it’s how they ran the initial 2014 event, but went to unblinded for the 2015s. I think the format served its purpose well. There were several wines that I liked more blind than I think I would have unblind, and two very notable wines falling flat for me that, unblind, I am pretty confident I would have evaluated much more favorably.
Here is the full lineup:
The flights were as follows:
Flight 1: Right Bank - Pavie, Canon, Troplong-Mondot, La Conseillante, L’Evangile
Flight 2: Margaux – Malescot St-Exupery, Rauzan-Segla, Brane-Cantenac
Flight 3: St. Julien – Leoville Barton, Leoville Poyferre, Langoa Barton, Branaire-Ducru
Flight 4: St. Estephe – Ormes de Pez, Cos D’Estournel, Lafon Rochet, Montrose
Flight 5: Pauillac – Pichon Comtesse, Pontet-Canet, Lynch-Bages, Grand-Puy-Lacoste
At a very high level, the biggest surprise for me was that a large majority of the wines showed sweet-toned, ripe fruit to an extent that I really was not expecting. Given that I have had the ’01 and ’04 vintages in fairly heavy rotation of late, this was a major departure that really stood out. However, the very large majority of the wines bolstered that sweet fruit core with tons of structuring acid and tannin. One way to put it might be that the ‘16s marry the freshness and structure of ’14 with the generous fruit of ’15 – avoiding the pitfalls of both vintages.
The wines were, by and large, in a “door cracked open” sort of stage of readiness; most were not truly shut down or backward, but nor were they wide-open as many of the ‘15s were last year. There is a ton of tannin remaining in most of the wines, and they retained a much more youthful purple hue than I recall the ‘14s and ‘15s showing (neither of which were bricky or anything, just not quite as electric purple as many of these wines showed). Everyone’s teeth were a pretty grimy shade of grey by the end of the night, which I do not recall quite as starkly in prior years—perhaps further evidence of the wines’ youth and vitality. In any event, I would say that it wouldn’t be madness to open a bottle of most of these wines if you have a 6er+, but that nearly all would profit from another decade sideways before you get after them in earnest.
The Margaux and St. Julien flights were the highlight of the tasting for me. Both communes showed remarkable balance and elegance, with Rauzan-Segla, D’Issan, and the Barton wines standing out from the crowd. The Right Bank flight was a huge improvement over last year’s death march, with Canon and Conseillante both quite firmly in the “excellent” category. However, the combination of palate fatigue and increasing tannic structure made tasting the Northern Medoc flights a bit tougher. Indeed, I found Flight 4 (St. Estephe) totally inscrutable – between tannin buildup, the brawny structure of the wines, and the fact that we were facing some time compression at that point, I had a very hard time evaluating the wines and my notes are, frankly, bad. The Pauillac flight was a slight improvement, with a monumental Lynch-Bages leading the pack for me.
Circling back to the note re: single-blind tasting at the outset to remark on two notable wines that disappointed me when tasted blind. Both Montrose and Pichon Comtesse fell quite flat for me at this tasting. Montrose was victim to the same problem as the rest of the St. Estephe flight, in that it was simply inscrutable. After the reveal I retasted the wine, and did get a better sense of its depth, density, and drive; however at the end of the day I was left with little more than the supposition that in 15 years it will be pretty good. By contrast, Pichon Comtesse simply struck me as heavy, sweet, and fatiguing. I was quite surprised by that given its near-legendary status, but this was a case where power of suggestion had no impact—I didn’t like it any better after the reveal.
As the above two might reasonably suggest, I would urge a grain of salt on my notes below. (1) I am not a particularly experienced taster of Bordeaux or anything else, given that I have only been interested in wine with any real seriousness for a few years; and (2) I particularly struggle with accurate evaluation of wines in this panel tasting context, especially with more tannic wines like Bordeaux. I think it is very likely that, drunk with dinner rather than blitzed through as wine 15 of 21 over a few hours, my view of many of these wines would be quite different (to the good or bad).
As with last year, I’ll post my notes on each flight as I finish them over the next few days. The discussion in last year’s thread was a real pleasure for me, and I hope we see the same over again this year!
First up, the Right Bankers.
