I also wonder how much age played a role in the 2018’s showing. Most 5 year old Bordeaux would get a pass for being in a dumb stage, needing time to “knit together,” etc.
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Interesting- I did not know that and appreciate the information. At release the wine was certainly very pretty, but hardly a 1998. Then a decade later it really started to get good- taking on some weight and rather thrilling sauvage notes. It was not a blockbuster relative to other vintages in the way Magdelaine was, for example, but then again La Conseillante was never a wine I considered to be a “blockbuster”, and the 1998 ended up in a great place (note- despite my best efforts, this remains a very difficult vintage to find in OWC at auction- so I must not be alone in my enthusiasm). Nor was it the only 1998 that started off a bit off-key. There was considerable concern over Lafleur’s balance even beyond question marks with the 1993 which I think will be sensational in time, but it certainly showed well alongside the 88 and 08 at a tasting I did right before COVID.
In the interest of being fair- 2016, while I do not think it will mature along the lines I would like, it certainly a wine of great promise and a rare recent wine for which I have high hopes. For me the question is not quality, but what it will be like an an old age as compared to past vintages. Here is my TN for reference- but while it sings high praise (and rightly so), it bears little resemblance to my typical La Conseillante TN,
Pop and pour, then revisited regularly for 5 hours. Checked in one last time 24 hours after opening from remains poured into a half bottle and sealed overnight with about a 1 inch airspace.
very deep purple-red color, an aggressive nose showing largely undeveloped primary fruit, cool and with some sweet notes- but fruit covering both the red and black sides of the spectrum, dark petals, on the palate at first a full-bodied intense wave of crushed raspberries, blackberry notes, hints of chocolate, but closed on the mid-palate, substantial yet very silky tannins, fine long finish with marble streaks and firm acids, with time cassis notes developed as well as plums and more sweet blackberry notes, the wine fleshed out even further- amazingly- showing itself to be a wine of formidable scale by La Conseillante standards, but even as it developed throughout the evening always that racy intensity of crushed raspberries remained at the core, despite the scale this is not a terribly generous wine at present- as the wine aired a sort of closed mass developed in the mid-palate, it was not overly hard or indicative of any excesses- but rather this mass is reminiscent of that closed ball of fruit wrapped in chalk and tannin that sometimes comes with a Musigny or Clos de la Roche when it is shut down, the oak makes a small appearance but is already being well absorbed into the overall structure, the following evening the wine had opened further- a profusion of violet notes on the nose along with chocolate notes and cassis, on the palate still a very large wine but thoroughly velvety, the core is still closed but more sedate now, knockout finish, this is a really big La Conseillante- but everything is in proper balance and if that tight little core of fruit in the middle explodes in time as it has in vintages past then we are in for a real treat when this matures, I will need to try more 2016s to know whether the departures from the norm are driven more by vintage or by the change in the winemaking team- but for now, as is the case at Chateau Palmer, this appears to be one of those happy cases where change is on balance for the better, as longtime fans know- La Conseillante has historically had a habit of seeming rather tame at release only to start getting unexpectedly complex and exciting around age 10, so I think it will be a decade before we see what is really going to come of this- but the potential here is thrilling to consider. If the scale of this is preserved and the usual progression takes place on top of that, I could see this being a vintage of historic importance at La Conseillante.
(*****), 2031+, but I certainly think it worthwhile to check in on this at around age 10. That is when the 1998 started to really get exciting.
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The tasting note for me is spot on, though I don’t think it’s as “big” a wine and the 2010. With the 2016 we have something that is more tightly wound than e.g. 2010, because not picked so late and matured more reductively. If the signature of La Conseillante is purity and vibrancy of fruit (“raspberry coulis” was how a veteran UK wine trade insider always described it, and that seems about right to me) combined with very suave, sensual structure on the palate, the 2016 seems to fit the bill (and for me, it’s much more Musigny than Clos de la Roche). With 2020, the fruit is even brighter and more firmly in the red part of the spectrum.
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Btw, while I like and own the 1998 Lafleur, the bottle you really need to try at the moment is the 1999!
Marcu Stanley said I haven’t really drunk a lot of young recent Bordeaux, but every time I do I end up questioning the hypothesis that “Bordeaux is the best it’s ever been” and we are living through a string of ‘best ever’ vintages. This tasting for me was a data point in support of the perspective that what we are seeing is a change in character as much or more than a change in quality.
I think this is modern internet speak “The ten best bordeaux”’ " the ten best restaurants" and it is sad that serious wine critics use this language. When I read Jeff Leve’s current instagram posts, 2022 the best wines ever from so many chateaus.
William Kelley emphasising the massive improvements taken place at the cellars in my mind does not equate to better wines but rather makes it easier to make wines.
It would be much more helpful, rather than saying - The best wines are being made at ***** to say For me or In my opinion or Based on my opinion the best wines are being made. A big difference.
I bought a magnum of 1998 Cos Estournel at a gastronomy sale. A wine spiced with brett, for me the best Cos I have drunk, or should I say the best Cos ever, the 1998 from Magnum, I am sure not many would agree with me.
Or similiarly, I loved the 1999 Fieuzal, it had beautiful tart red fruit acidity I love that in a red wine. For me the best Fieuzal ever, or should I say the best Fieuzal ever, full stop. Again, I am not sure many would agree with me.
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In one sense there are quite clearly more estates than ever before in history producing great wines.
In another sense the wines created are not necessarily better than they ever were in pure peak terms. Conseillante 22, Yquem 45, Lafite 53, Palmer 61, Haut Brion 89, Lafleur 00 and, you know, countless other examples will perhaps be joined by todays wines at the peak of what great wine can be but they will never be pushed off.
Well, at least not from my point of view.
There is a quite clear directional move in Bordeaux going on (the word Burgundian keeps being bandied about a bit maybe too frequently in tasting notes making me cautious) and it will be interesting to see in 30 years where exactly we end up. I think the wines are of supreme quality and they give me immense pleasure. Just pondering how they will compare.
The world evolves and changes continually. Bordeaux while often constant is now more adaptable. Many, many estates are truly making the best wines they ever have and I am as usual optimistic about the future as the pendulum keeps on swinging.
-Conseillante and l’Evangile can be seen faintly in the background mist from the cellars of Cheval Blanc.
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I’m curious for those who are old enough to remember tasting through these wines upon release in the great vintages of the previous era like 1990, 1998, and 2000, what were the hallmarks of whether you thought the wines would be great or not? And if a wine was approachable and demonstrative, did that generate suspicion it would be a not long-lived wine?
I often find myself pondering this same question.
For three of my personal perfect wine experiences we can find the below early notes from RP. I doubt many would disagree that they are wines at the very top of the Bordeaux echelon. Yet they seem to fall outside of what is being described as todays stars. I mean, syrup of Cabernet… I have been guilty many a time of having deemed early en primeur samples from 2005, 2009 and 2010 too powerful and over the top only to humbly having to admit that in the end they turned into sublime wines of transcendental quality.
2000 LAFLEUR
Opaque purple-colored. A return to the powerful yet prodigiously concentrated style that made this estate so famous. It is not a wine for neophytes or those unwilling to defer their gratification for more than a decade. Dense and sweet, it possesses a complex bouquet of liquid minerals, black raspberry liqueur, kirsch, truffles, currants, and incense. Extremely long as well as excruciatingly tannic, but well-balanced by its wealth of fruit and extract.
1983 PALMER
One of the superb wines of the vintage. Ccontinues to display a saturated purple/garnet color, and an intense perfume of jammy black fruits, smoked meats, flowers, cedar, and Asian spices. Super-concentrated, powerful, and full-bodied, this huge, unctuously textured wine is approaching its plateau of maturity. Because of the high Merlot content it can easily be drunk now, yet promises to last for another 20-25 years.
1961 LATOUR
Remarkably unevolved and backward, although no one at the tasting could ignore the lavish quantities of sweet, jammy fruit. There is great density and concentration to the wine. The bouquet was less evolved, but the presence of copious quantities of rich black fruits, damp earth, leather, and spicy wood did not go unnoticed. This full-bodied, monumental wine tastes like syrup of Cabernet. The port-like, unctuous, chewy finish is to die for. If you are fortunate enough to have magnums stashed away, no matter what your age, this wine will undoubtedly outlive you.
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I would hope the “in my opinion” is implicit. When a film, theater or restaurant critic writes a review, the “in my opinion” is also generally left implicit. And the opinion is interesting to the extent that it is informed by deep contextual understanding, a coherent point of view, and clear technical criteria.
My article emphasized Bordeaux’s present and future, as I am not particularly interested in rehashing the debates of the last half-century and would prefer to move beyond them. But when, in that piece, I claimed that contemporary Bordeaux is producing its best wines of the modern era, some historical context, at least in broad brush strokes, is interesting to substantiate the technical criteria that lie behind that claim.
The real point of departure in Bordeaux came with the frost of 1956, which killed 40% of the region’s vines, severely damaging 45% more. Until then the top estates of Bordeaux, which had been late to replant after phylloxera, had largely resisted mechanization, staying with oxen/horses and manual labor, and very high density plantings. Yields in the Médoc up until 1961 were very low, around 15 hectoliters per hectare. In the aftermath of the 1956 frost, vineyards had to be replanted, and the opportunity was taken to replant higher yielding selections, with more Merlot (and even hybrids at some top estates such as Rauzan Ségla), often at lower densities adapted to commercial tractors. Modern agrochemicals were also adopted wholesale. The result was that yields went up fast, with in the 1950s averaging in the region of 40 hectoliters per hectare, up to 50-60 hectoliters per hectare by the 1970s. In many places, mechanical cultivation was replaced or complemented by herbicide use: by the 1980s, more than half of French vineyards were treated with herbicides instead of ploughing.
When your yields go up and your leaf surface area remains the same, your fruit generally ripens more slowly. Moreover, different vine genetics and different yields ripen differently. Thus even when the fruit of the 1970s was picked with similar sugar numbers to the fruit of the 1950s, the results were not the same. That was combined with a loss of artisanal know-how in the cellars, and many estates went over to machine harvesting (e.g. Brane Cantenac and Pontet Canet). Quite how bad the wines of the 1970s were is often exaggerated, but in general it clearly wasn’t a very glorious decade for Bordeaux.
By the late 1950s/early 1960s these higher yields and differently organized vineyards had ushered us into a period vintages that were not sunny, dry and ripe tended to be a washout. The 1982 vintage underlined that if you could ripen these larger crops you could actually make very good wine, and it also unleashed a new wave of investment as the region began to prosper again. People began to try to harvest later; in many cases, the weather complied; and Bordeaux’s agronomists also rolled out new rootstock-clone combinations that could ripen larger yields faster.
By the late 1990s, picking later combined with new winemaking techniques that enriched wines and made them taste better earlier (malo in barrel, micro-oxygenation etc) ushered in “Modern” Bordeaux, with a capital “m”, as exemplified by the garage wine movement. The limits of what was possible were tested, and the limits of good taste frequently exceeded, into the first decade of the new millennium.
Around about 2010, producers began to re-interest themselves in their vineyards, and also to slowly roll back some of their stylistic excesses, and this is where my big article really takes off. That shift is occurring in the context of a changing climate that has seen some very extreme vintages that have actually accelerated stylistic change by quite simply obliging producers to rethink what they had been doing.
So if you step back, there’s a lot to unpack: first, the long-term consequences of the 1956 frost that reduced the quality of vine genetics (the Bordelais are a bit late to the massale selection game, but everyone is now getting to it); altered encépagements in favor of Merlot on both banks (everyone today is replanting Cabernet where it used to be); and which saw lower planting densities (an estate like Calon Ségur is still being replanted at higher densities).
Then there is the agronomy of the 1970s-80s, with too much herbicide and fertilizer. The shift here in just a decade has been huge.
Then there is the clonal and rootstock legacy of the last thirty years, which will take time to digest. Clones designed for optimizing ripening, planted on drought susceptible rootstocks such as riparia, are a disaster in very hot, very dry years. But you cannot just replant a 90-hectare château in one go.
And then there are the stylistic and technical evolutions, which I won’t resume here as they are covered quite thoroughly in my big piece. Again, we are going back to the future, before vast stainless steel tanks and powerful must pumps encouraged producers to break up vineyards into bigger, more convenient blocks. And we are going beyond the notion that problems in the vineyards can be solved simply by picking riper and using some clever winemaking tricks that will seduce critics en primeur. All of this is occurring, I repeat, in the context of vintages that are very different in terms of temperature and insolation than the vintages of twenty years ago.
So while I don’t say the wines today are “the best ever”, I do tend to think that they’re the best since the early 1960s, for all of these reasons, and much as I love some of the wines made between then and now.
As for the 2020 Figeac, for me it’s the best since at least the (perplexingly poorly rated) 1998 and probably since 1964. I do think some of the old régime’s vintages got short shrift from the press, such as the aforementioned 1998, the 2005, the 2000 and plenty of others (I own a lot). But once one understands the estate’s vineyards (and I have walked the whole property), it is obvious how the wines could have been improved in terms of managing harvest parcel by parcel and taking the choice to wait between one block and another, rather than simply picking continuously. And they were not always as consistent as they should have been: the 2004 which showed well in this tasting can also be held back by brett, for example, and the 1982 is very variable. All of this by way of “showing my proof” as it were for my review of the 2020. I think as I do a few more retrospectives and publish a bit of a backlog of notes, my position will be a bit easier to understand when it comes to vintages such as 2018 and 2015, to say nothing of the 2009s and plenty of early 21st-century vintages, as there are quite a few wines that I would be inclined to downgrade vis a vis what is being made today.
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Is the “actual” consulting enologist Jean Valmy Nicolas? Jeff Leve’s page on Figeac mentions both Nicolas and Rolland.
Ha, that’s an infamous Leve quote!
I’d love to try to, what I meant to say is that I keep trying to stop buying new release Bordeaux. You and Levenberg have already caused me to buy multiple cases of 2019!
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I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to start my discovery of Bordeaux with 1982, which tasted very well on release and still does (although my experiences today with it are very few and far between). All (or nearly all, I believe) of the British writers said it wouldn’t age well, and time proved them wrong quite quickly. I think it was a happy accident sort of vintage - I’ve never had the same sensations since. Of course not all 82s were as good as other subsequent vintages by the same producers, but the general mouthfeel was ripe, not overripe, tannic, not over-tannic, and fresh without being green - all that with 12.5 to 13°, if I remember well.
I think Bordeaux is simply on a learning curve. What was good advice at one point became outdated. I remember driving past Poyferré in the great heat of 2018 and seeing their team removing leaves from vines, as if they were back in the past, and thinking how crazy it was - before seeing them do exactly the same in following years. But the difficulty with any industry is to adapt to changing times and in agriculture, it is that much harder. As William writes, how do you replant 90 hectares overnight?
I’m pretty optimistic about Bordeaux’s future. Techniques have improved, along with attention to detail, and now most producers have left the dogmatic straightjacket behind them, it’s going to be fun to try the new stuff. Whether or not the new wines will hit the same buttons for me as the 82 remains to be seen, but I remember other old farts saying the same about 1961 when I started out!
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I understand a critic has a completely different overview and perspective and based on this can make informed judgements that we mere mortals lack in many cases. Not wine but look at Van Gogh, never found recognition in his lifetime or James Joyce was turned down by every publishing house, is a testimony to the critcs getting it wrong. I am not saying you are getting it wrong but taste is a funny and highly ideosyncratic thing.
I think it was Lecaillon of Roederer, who said, we are paying a lot of money today for wines and champagnes, that older generations took for granted.
Lecaiillon talks of the golden generation in the Champagne, the 50s and 60s. Selection Massale, no herbicides or fertilisers.
I could not say what era was the golden generation for Bordeaux but it seems from what you write, producers are trying to dial back the clock. A return to selection massale, no fertlisers or herbicides can only be applauded. but Bordeaux has lost a lot of credibility and it will be difficult to get it back, hyperbole does not help.
When I hear, best vintage ever or my customers hear this, alarm bells ring. You have a great gift of articulation, I don’t think you need resort to such all embracing terms.
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Well absolutely: but that is why on the one hand I try to give my reasoning, in quite a lot of depth as in this case; and on the other, make qualified rather than open-ended claims. The best Figeac of the new era, or the best wines since the early 1960s are different from “best ever”, which is really a meaningless claim, and even ludicrous from the point of view of someone with 1961 Haut-Brion etc etc in the cellar.
Bordeaux has indeed lost a lot of credibility—something people in the region struggle to understand (so-called “Bordeaux bashing” would be an interesting subject for a post-en primeur thread)—and the media that covers Bordeaux all the more so. Of course, the worse elements in Bordeaux encourage this, fêting no critic so much as one with the potential to be a “useful idiot”; but when one sees the press awarding 100/100 to a wine that the winemaker himself publicly says he doesn’t like, one has to think of Mark Twain’s remark when asked if he had ever bribed a journalist, to the effect that, given what the press will do for free, he had never found it necessary.
Consumers are right to have score and hyperbole fatigue and it is incumbent on the press to change this by making fewer ex-cathedra pronunciations and giving more clearly argumented reasoning, backed up by first-hand knowledge derived from spending extended amounts of time in wine producing regions. We are living through the end of the “drive by shooting” school of wine criticism and it is my hope that something more interesting is going to emerge in its wake.
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Brilliant! Not seen that before.
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OK I really have no idea exactly what this means yet, but I just received an email out of the blue from somebody deep in the know that says it is Duclos, not Rolland, that is now consulting and making the wine at both Figeac and Conseillante. Of course, someone could also be f’ng with me to get me to buy it! ;). I think it is legit, though.
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Blockquote
Excellent thread and discussion. William your back story on the historical evolutions of Bordeaux was fascinating.
But on this point (the end of the drive by shooting school of criticism) I have to say that while I wish this were true, I sincerely doubt this particular end is nigh. Instead the tools of production and distribution - having plummeted to nearly zero cost - are here forever, with all the positive and negative that entails. Which just means that we each will get the critics we deserve, based on the effort interest and care we expend in finding them. I will continue to read you eagerly, and ignore those who take different tacks.
Gotta say that I am way more comfortable with “Best vintage ever produced at Chateau XYZ” than a reference to “drive by shooting” in any context.
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Hmmm…Rolland is no longer consultant at Figeac, then Figeac gets 100 points…coincidence?
That may be another of the misattributions Twain has benefited from. I believe the quip dates to this. Poem: The British Journalist by Humbert Wolfe
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