Bordeaux 2003 blind tasting

WINE TALK
1

Last friday 12 Dutch Winegeeks came together in restaurant Bottles Sas van Gent for a very nice blindtasting.
25 wines in total. 23 x Bordeaux 2003, 1 Napa and 1 Supertuscan.

The wines performed fantastic…except 1…

We had a brilliant winner: Pape Clement (recieved 8 perfect scores) and a great runner-up: Leoville Poyferré.

The most expensive wine ended last…Pavie. Totally unbalanced, very poor quality.

A lot of right bank wines performed very well! 2003 too hot for Merlot in Bordeaux??? Absolutely NOT in general!

A lot off wines were open for business with a very nice life ahead…

Behind the wines you see the average score of the 12 tasters.



Pape Clement 99,17
Leoville Poyferre 97,42
Angelus 96,5
Montrose 96,25
Pontet Canet 96,17
Clos Fourtet 96
La Gaffeliere 95,75
Le Plus Fleur Bouard 95,5
Valandraud 95,08
Branaire Ducru 95
Lafon Rochet 94,33
Dominus 93,92
Troplong Mondot 93,67
Palmer 93,42
Sociando Mallet 93,33
Sassicaia 93,25
Cos D’estournel 93,18
Leoville Barton 93,17
Lascombes 92,5
Pichon Baron 92
Calon Segur 91
Pavie Macquin 90,92
Lynch bages 90,25
Pavillon Rouge 90,17
Pavie 88,5


Next Party: All the big guns of Bordeaux 1994 in Restaurant Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam…

2

Hi John, and welcome!

Thanks for the look at 03.

You may want to change your thread title to 2003, perhaps?

3

How does “unbalanced, very poor quality” even get 88 pts? Did some people really like the Pavie?

4

Nice to see these notes, I have been meaning to post notes on two 2003’s tasted last week. Montrose and Las Cases. Montrose is wonderful but so tightly wound. Las Cases is so pleasant today. I had an '85 Las Cases about a month ago and all of the characteristic notes of Las Cases were very present in the '03.

The discovery of the tasting for me was that the best 2003’s are fresh, balanced and very (VERY) good. I would avoid the Montrose for a long time (or decant for a long time) and I would be happy to serve Las Cases again tomorrow.

5

Here some pictures of the 2003 Bordeaux blind tasting:

6

No report on the '09 Chave??

7

Thanks for the report. It validates a few of my recent tastings and cellar holdings. I fairly recently gave high marks to the Clos Fourtet and La Gaffeliere. I’ve got Angelus too, but I have dipped in yet. [cheers.gif]

8

How was the Mouton?

9

Setting RMP aside most critics (Will Lyons & Tim Atkin recently) bash this vintage at every opportunity…yet consumers really like the wines as this tasting suggests.

Tom

10

I am not a huge fan of the vintage in general, but I have loved the Calon Segur lately. It is in a nice place right now.

11

Most competent critics I have read have taken a more nuanced view, which is fully warranted. There was a ton of garbage produced in 2003. The right bank, in particular, produced an ocean of deeply flawed wines. But there are also some monumental wines, especially i the Medoc. And I don’t think one can find any reference to RMP saying he loves 2003; he too said that the vintage is extremely heterogeneous in quality.

12

Out of the couple I’ve tasted recently, strongly preferred the Angelus to the Leoville Poyferre.

13

Hi Peter and Fred

The L’ Hermitage Blanc Cave 2009
Great wine.
Poke wine pur sang, powerful, Incredibly beautiful ripe fruit
almond, flowers, finesse 98 Point

Mouton 2003
Unfortunately, Cork… :angry:

14

Chave was powerful indeed but also very very elegant and focussed. 97+/100

Mouton badly corked… [swearing.gif]

15

Of these wines, which would you advise drinking and which would you wait and for how long:
Montrose, Pontet Canet, Branaire Ducru, Lafon Rochet
Thanks

16

I have described 2003 as a ‘schizophrenic’ vintage before now; taste a small sample and you might hit lucky, and conclude it’s a great vintage. Or you might be unlucky, and conclude it’s a terrible vintage. Taste broadly and you will agree with Neal above, it is a very heterogeneous vintage where there are some very good wines, and some very poor ones. Broadly speaking more moisture-retentive soils did better, so northern Médoc did well, but there was success down into Pauillac and St Julien. Some Pessacs I have tasted have matured very quickly, but some wines - notably Chevalier and Haut-Bailly - did very well, more so than the Dillon properties IMO. Some right bank wines did well, e.g. Clos Fourtet but others have really done nothing other than fall apart.

There are no truly great wines in the vintage IMO; good, yes, but not great. They’re certainly difficult to taste as a group, as they are all bruising, blocky and low-acid in style, and with such wines Brettanomyces crops up now and again, but in isolation they can be good to drink. This is an important point as critics should try to remember not to allow a note on a single wine to be influenced by the tedium of the line-up of sixty-plus wines (the number I tasted at a 2003 review earlier this year) just tasted, because that is not how wines are consumed at home. A tasting of sixty low acid, bruising wines, each one lacking in any sense of subtlety, is bound to be tiresome. A single bottle consumed with roast beef, however, shared between two or three people, is a very different matter.

In view of its character it is perhaps not surprising that some people choose to ‘bash’ the vintage, although I don’t know if Tim or Will did that. But I know some have; after all, it has long been a vintage fashionable to knock, and alongside the good wines there are certainly some that are quite simply falling apart. So the jobbing blogger knows he is on safe ground with a cutting and critical piece; it makes a good story, and the blog hit-counter ticks upwards. Personal taste also comes into it; I think the 2003 Pavie is roasted, baked, over-ripe, chewy and overly tannic but I have seen other people rave about it, maybe even on this forum, so each to their own I guess.

17

I disagree. There are some really great wines in this vintage with enough acidity to grow in future. The tasters in this group are no “newbies”. We do this kind of tastings a lot and we all have different preferences. So if you look at the average score of most of the wines, the quality was very good. We were also very surprised about the quality of some of the right bank wines. So not only Clos Fourtet, but also La Gaffeliere, Angelus, Troplong Mondot, le Plus Fleur the Bouard.

Future will tell but i have no doubts for the above mentioned wines…

18

Lafon Rochet, drinking but no hurry
Montrose, wait for 5 more years
Pontet Canet, start drinking or wait for 3 more years
Branaire Ducru, start drinking or wait for 3 more years

19

How was the Domaine de Chvalier? Corked?

20

It was the Chevalier blanc 2003. It was good but not great. For a chevalier it was very powerful…a little bit too much of everything…90/100