Gilman Says '85 Margaux is "Lifeless" and Gives it 70

WINE TALK
41

I am confused. Isn’t the purpose of posting or publishing a tasting note to describe one’s perception of a wine from that bottle at that point in time? And certainly conclusions can drawn from that experience and past experiences which may be one person’s opinion which others may agree or disagree with based upon their own tasting experience with those wines. Why would a bad review of a wine “require” that one taste more bottles while a very favorable review would not? Certainly I would agree that one should not make overreaching pronouncements and draw grand conclusions from one bad bottle, given that undamaged bottles may show variation and be “off” in other ways, but that was not the case here where I believe this was another in a string of John’s disappointing experiences with the wine in other vintages. But I had better read the article (which as a subscriber I had not yet read, and as a non-Bordeaux drinker I had not rushed to read) before I go out on a limb any further.

42

to me, this is far more interesting. i haven’t read the article, but can someone please start a thread on that?

43

Why is it so hard to believe that he’s giving his honest opinion of the wine? Simply because it has Margaux on the label does not mean that it is an immortal wine that will always be magnificent.

44

Eggsactly, Robert. That’s the only thing you have to go on. If the wine doesn’t taste as good as you “know” it should, or if someone’s TN doesn’t agree w/ what the
reader “knows” it should taste like; then what are you going to do?? Reject all TN’s because it may could have been a “bad” btl?? Or maybe post your own TN and report that you gave it a 72??
Tom

45

Robert,

just a few side-notes:

it is easily possible that a single bottle, a full case … or a complete patch, even a complete full shipping (overseas) is flawed by some cirumstances …
so if a taster/writer like Gilman makes a public statement that this wine (not this single bottle) is “completely lifeless” I think it would require double … better triple-checking.

Moreover I cannot imagine a wine that was a great example of the vintage for 20-25 years quite suddenly loses all positive attributes … and sits in the glass lifeless and only worth 70 points (which for me is a wine on the border between totally uninteresting and flawed) - sorry, at least I feel he overshoot the target immensly.
And since he is a professional I don´t think this serves his reputation.

3rd: I have tasted the wine several times over 20+ years, it was always very fine in the 95-point region … and even at the last opportunity (blind) 5 months ago when the wine proved to be corked eventually one could see for 15-20 minutes how good it usually (and still) is.

So I simply don´t get this statement.

46

I think the key question here is, is the critic scoring the bottle or scoring the wine? If the latter, is the wine’s overall score supposed to be a theoretical average of all bottles (in which case producers with TCA or other problems would deserve bad marks no matter what heights they can achieve); a theoretical average of all non-flawed bottles; or a “best showing” at the top of the distribution indicating what a wine is capable of with perfect storage and good luck?

I don’t think there’s any consensus on this. I know that when fellow Berserker Corey Miller has the same wine multiple times, he writes a different note on CT with a different score for each bottle depending on how it showed. I take a different approach: I only post one note per wine, and update it if I try a different bottle to include the various tastings. And my score reflects the best bottle I’ve tried rather than the average, on the assumption that poor storage or the vagaries of evolution of an organic product over decades cannot be attributed to the winemaker. (See, for example, Community Tasting Note - 1989 Le Bahans de Château Haut-Brion - CellarTracker, in which I bumped up my score a point after tasting a better example of '89 Bahans HB.)

No one is accusing John of “mis-scoring” the bottle he drank–some might question the exact number he assigned, but that just has to do with the arbitrary question of whether your scale is 0-100, 50-100, or the Parker-consensus 80-100. The point is that he didn’t like it and put it at the lower end of his scoring range. The real debate is over John’s extrapolation that his bottle’s poor showing is broadly representative of all remaining well-stored bottles, rather than a disappointing outlier. On that issue, my personal view is that he’s a bit too confident here–bottle variation for 30-year-old wines is enormous even with flawless storage. If I were in his shoes, I would have phrased my comments a bit more cautiously, along the lines of “This poor bottle continues a streak of underwhelming showings I’ve seen from this producer, both in this specific vintage and in the surrounding years. While of course not statistically significant, I believe this constitutes significant anecdotal evidence that these wines may have been built to drink younger and are now well past their prime.” But with a bit more precision on both his part and those of his critics on what a score represents, we wouldn’t need to have this occasionally heated conversation.

47

I didn’t say that the wine is immortal because it is Margaux. label bias isn’t the only type of bias one has when they taste a wine.

48

that was not what I intended to imply. I was implying that it might be difficult to fairly evaluate a bottle under those circumstances.

49

Good on JG posting his thoughts and articles as he sees it. We complain when critics score a wine too high or score a wine too low - I much prefer the latter where it involves wine I quite like…
Anyone who now needs to offload their '90, '86, '85, and '83 Margaux please feel free to PM me - I might stretch to 80% of your cost price to ease the pain :wink:!

50

Totally agree … [welldone.gif] [winner.gif]

51

I find it more difficult to understand a 95 point score for a corked bottle of '85 Margaux than a 70 point score for a non-flawed bottle.

Knowing that John is not stingy with low scores for poorly performing wines, I am inclined to congratulate him for not pulling any punches. His note may be based on a single bottle but it was blind and he offers plenty of context. Taken in that context it should provide a cautionary note, even if it isn’t an absolute predictor of how other bottles will perform. After all, the wine is almost 30 years old. Wide variations should not be surprising.

52

David,
if you mean my posting above, please read carefully: I didn´t say that this (eventually corked) bottle of Margaux 85 was rated 95 points … I said that in my earlier tastings it was always a wine in the 95-point range, and this particular bottle first gave the impression that it was performing equally fine (before the TCA came out).

Have you ever had a corked wine that showed BETTER than the same wine from a sound bottle?
So if this corked bottle was able to show a niveau in the mid-90ies for 15 min. - I simply conclude that TCA-free sound bottles are still equally good, at least most bottles from Austrian cellars.

53

I had the 85 Margaux about a year ago, we drank it with four people total and everyone (including me) really liked the wine. It was extremely harmonic, balanced, for me Margaux typical with delicate red fruit and floral notes and - even though I’ve had more exciting 1985 Bordeaux - just a great, great pleasure to drink. It was far, far away from being lifeless, very lively in fact and not indicating any rush to drink it up. To me it’s pretty irrelevant what John Gilman says about that wine. I’m more interested in what Michael Broadbent (with whose taste I can align the most regarding Bordeaux) said about the wine and he liked it a lot.

A friend of mine had the Margaux 1985 out of several bottles recently and was compelled by the wine as well.

54

So, if a large percentage of bottles of a given wine are bad, a critic should source enough to find a good one, then only print the review of the good bottle?

I think Robert is spot on. The critic should be honest about what was tasted and the readers should be honest to themselves about what they read. The fact that there are current good reviews on CT for this wine, plus John’s review, provides the honest context.

55

Thank you for clarifying. To answer your question, I have had bottles where there appears to be a potentially great wine hiding underneath the obvious effects of TCA. But I have never had a bottle of wine with no overt TCA taint show well enough for me to consider it excellent (>90 points), only to reveal TCA later on that was initially too subtle to detect. These bottles always smell and taste somewhat dead to me from the get-go. Given time, the telltale TCA aroma will come forth. Maybe it’s just lack of experience on my part, and I suppose it could happen, but my expression of skepticism was based on my personal experience.

56

Gerhard and David - interestingly, on several occasions I have had a tca-tainted as well as clean version of a wine within a similar window and found the tainted one less evolved and the clean one just past the mature apex. I wonder whether tca perversely helps to preserve wine sometimes? Now, if there were only a fool-proof way of getting rid of the taint… Actually, isn’t there some technique involving gladwrap or something?

57

Sorry, not my experience.
There are bottles that smell and taste fine initially (that doesn´t mean a sound bottle wouldn´t be better still) - and only with additional air (and sometimes a lot of it) the bad taste and smell comes out slowly … often only after an hour or more).
A friend who is food-chemist told me once that it is a question of the TCA-level … sometimes the level can be so low that nobody will smell and taste anything typical, only the smell and taste gets muted with time … and the only suspicious detail will be that the wine is different (less expressive) than usual …

I repeat myself: if a wine is very slightly TCA-tainted, a sound bottle of the same wine will most probably be better - not worse!

58

I was at the tasting, and the wine while showing no sign of any obvious flaws, it was dull. It had none of the mid palate lift and lushness which most of the wines we tasted that night showed.

59

Mark, do you have any hypothesis/prediction as to how representative that bottle is of the overall remaining population of well-stored 1985 Margaux? That seems to be the key question here.

60

Completely agree. And while I’m a big proponent of CT, there is something about drinking a 1st growth that can make it an elevated experience regardless of how well the wine shows, which is why it’s not so hard to understand why it may be garnering favorable recent scores on CT.