Option (iv) At eight years old the Bordeaux Superieur is mature and tastes better than a 1st growth that won’t be mature for another 20 years. For example, I have had 1970 Latour several times over the years. The first time I really liked it was this year – when it was great. Before this year, it was too young. I am not saying that this is the case in the situation at the GJE. I just think that we often overrate our ability to tasted young wines and see the potential. And, it is possible in 20 years that the Reignac will still be better.
François:
I recently had a Grand Cru St. Emilion called Chateau Haut Segottes and an unclassified Margaux called Chateau Moulin de Tricot that I thought were pretty good (although overpriced) – these were 2005s. What do you think of these properties?
One things that needs to be considered is that the Reignac may excel (at the moment) for blind tasting. Blind tasting is very different than drinking a wine (short sips, skewed context of the other wines in the lineup) and very few tasters pick the same wines in a blind trial that they prefer to drink in a normal dinner context (even if blind).
Blind tasting a lineup of wines is so different from normal wine drinking that it is guaranteed to produce different results.
Glad to see Kevin Harvey’s comments. I used to assume blind tasting was the only way to taste. Kevin’s posts over there convinced me otherwise. Five second to 15 minute tasting snapshots under the best controlled conditions hardly render an accurate panorama.
Even so, I appreciate the information GJE sessions provide.
That’s true for sure and a point I’ve made so many times I feel like a broken record, but I don’t know if it applies in this case since it’s very likely that if you spent a whole evening drinking an '01 Bordeaux Superieur and the next evening with an '01 first growth, you would prefer the Bordeaux Superieur - as Howard points out, the first growth isn’t supposed to taste very good now. (Howard’s right that that’s the obvious option (iv), but I didn’t list it because Francois already answered that point.)
Howard : yes, I know Haut Segottes by name only : so, no experience and I do not know the other with a quite strange name !
If I fully agree that with time the firsts develop an exceptional range of qualities (remember : my favorite, and by far, remains Haut-Brion), I just can only repeat what I said above :
But, to go in your way, you give me an idea of tasting :
a : I take a decade which, without any discussion, is ready to drink : the 80’
b : for every year, I take every first growths
c : for every year, I take Sociando-Mallet, a simple basci “cru bourgeois” at that time
We add all the results. Blind. 15 to tasters. I bet a La Tâche that Sociando will not be the last one… as it should be on paper !
I agree but the blind aspect of the GJE format is different from the mass, side-by-side aspect of it. You can still do a blind tasting without those issues - just cover a few bottles in foil and draw one at random when you’re in the mood to test yourself… The mass side-by-side aspect is different and certainly leads to preferences different from the ones you might have if you consumed the same wines in a different context. (My take on that here.)
But here I don’t think the prejudice you’re refuting is one that anyone holds - nobody thinks first-growth pedigree guarantees a better result than a less-pedigreed wine, just that it gives a natural advantage and (ideally) a particular character which is there even in less successful years.
I agree with you on the larger point that first growths will not always come out first – or probably even most of the time. I have seen that in blind tastings I have done (and even nonblind tastings) that other wines are often better.
On the other hand, I have not been that excited by the Sociando-Mallet I have tasted. My issue with it is nice fruit but a bit simple – I am a Burg guy so I value complexity over weight. I don’t remember ever having had that blind – I wonder if I would like it better if I did.
A point that is just starting to be touched on, ageing. Many Americans have a very very short time line for wines. Most often a year within being released. (I will point out that I often rail about posters doing TNs and ratings of big wines immediately upon release and drawing lines in the sand, but we won’t go there today.)
Many of the 1st growths and Grand cru’s, as well as quite a few Oregon pinots and CA cabs, are not meant to be drank young. That comes from a large European perspective of wines.
American winemakers most often, play to the “drink now” group. I very often see great wines trashed, here in the States, because they are not drink now. Even worse many great Euro wines goes through a dumb phase. How or why would you rate a wine in its dumb phase, an then say a much lessor wine is the better wine overall?
A European winemaker was recently talking about this in regards to a recent blockbuster vintage of big red wines. He said :“Europeans will buy these wines and lay them down a 10-20 without thinking or further consideration. Then for a special occasion, and with great good, pull one out to drink and cherish. Americans will open them immediately and serve with hamburgers and hot dogs and tell me what they think. You cannot explain to most Americans that a certain wine is meant to be aged or that it isn’t a bratwurst wine.”
This european winemaker likes to dream : the situation is not that kind of black or white. It is gray in both sides of the atlantic.
Trust me, the bad fashion opening top wines made for laying down is also in practice in Europe !
Gordon, that’s totally wrong and ridiculous. For one thing, if you look at Wilfred’s post on the tasting Francois was reporting on, you will see that the European panelists rated the “drink now” wine higher than at least one American.
Second, the contrast between European connoisseurs “cherishing” these wines after laying them down 10-20 years vs. Americans drinking them with “hamburgers and hot dogs” is a total myth that could only have been propagated by an idiotic European snob who has never been to America. In fact, most Europeans can’t lay down high end wines for 10-20 years because they don’t work full-time and are too busy paying off their 90% tax burden and putting out car fires in the Paris suburbs set by all the disgruntled youths they imported to keep their social welfare ponzi schemes going. The majority of European wine drinkers buy the equivalent of two-buck Chuck by the vrac, and plenty of Europeans who are seriously into wine are just as worshipful of drink-now spoof like Harlan and Sine Qua Non as the average L.A. talent agent. Moreover, Americans don’t eat a whole lot of hot dogs and hamburgers. Even your stereotypical fat lazy stupid ugly American is probably more likely to eat a burrito or a box of Chinese food. If it weren’t for Americans like Kermit Lynch (and, yes, Robert Parker) who built a market for those fancy European wines that need 10-20 years of laying down before being suitably cherished, far fewer of them would exist today and many would lack the capital that has enabled them to make wines so worthy of being cherished.
The distinction to draw is not between people from one country and another but people who have an appreciation for one style of wine vs. another, regardless of where those people happen to come from.
Since I was not at the tasting all I can do is surmise. And I surmise that Reignac did well because it was in a line-up of many wines that are tight,closed or not showing well at the moment. I also think the Reignac style has become more overtly flamboyant and those wines tend to do well in blind tastings.
I always resonate with Kevin’s observations regarding blind tastings and think his point is important.
That said, its interesting that people often note the drawbacks in going through a lot of wines in, say, a morning and how it would be different over a meal. Does that mean that we should then only go by a format such as Bob’s Hedonist Gazette reports? A critic, whether its Bob, Tanzer, or others, often goes though 30 wines, zoom zoom zoom, one after the other, in an hour or two–just with the label in front of them. Hardly seems that’s representative, either, but people view it as the gold standard. Somehow the same method, just without the label, is more flawed? (By the way, I’m assuming in writing this most critics know the identity of the wine even though Parker states he tastes blind whenever possible, which if taken at face value, would imply his approach is more like the GJE approach).
Have folks observed a professional critic blow through 30 wines in a short period? I have; I couldn’t believe what I witnessed. Yet, again, that’s viewed as the gold standard.
Great point, Wilfred - indeed, If I were going to pay attention to Parker I would definitely put more faith in his Hedonist Gazette writeups than in his mass spit-and-scores, and it’s been an endless source of amusement for me how people consider the former less legitimate and the latter somehow “official” as if the score of a wine is some indelible property like an atomic number.
And now we have the stereotypes on both sides. Frankly, I doubt that there is that much difference. The biggest difference likely is that for middle and working class people, wine is more the beverage of choice in countries like Italy and France and beer is more their beverage in the US (and probably England and Germany). Frankly, I doubt that a whole lot of people anywhere are aging wine for 20 years. There are a relatively few of us and, of this group, having met wine board types from the US, Europe and Australia, I frankly don’t see that much differences that can be boiled down to geography. Certainly, there are people who like bigger, lower acid reds and there are people who like Burgundy. But the differences don’t correspond to geography. European and American Burgundy lovers tend to like Bachelet, DRC, Rousseau, Mugneret-Gibourg, etc., etc.
Gordon,
I only hope this was posted as a joke.
You’ll be hard pressed to find any wine drinkers in Europe, or elsewhere for that matter, that drink more mature Champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy etc than the people I regularly drink with. And we’re all Americans.
Ask your fellow European wine brokers where ALL of the aged Champagne has been shipped for the last decade as well as the majority of older top Bordeaux and Burgundies.
And btw, I’m more of a pizza than bratwurst guy when it comes to drinking great mature wines.
If one tastes a wine with a meal (ostensibly the most representative way most of us drink wines), the way the wine shows can be effected by the food one serves. If one has a long, leisurely dinner with a bottle of wine, arguably one has, in some sense, the “best” picture of that wine that it is possible to have. However, one also then loses the opportunity of tasting it side-by-side with other wines which one might well have preferred over that same dinner.
The problem is that there is simply no perfect way to taste wines. And to that end, I think your earlier comment about cognitive dissonance is so apt, Wilfred.
I should also add that it isn’t really fair to blame the big guns with how they do tastings. Assuming one is supposed to taste through all of Bordeaux, the Rhône and California during a year (just to take one example), how else are they to be done? One simply isn’t going to have time to do them any other way than in masses. And further, how do any of us do our tastings? Do we assiduously refuse to write up notes when we go to large trade tastings at which we can run through twenty or forty wines at a clip? Or do we do precisely the same as those big guns – viz., write up TNs, all the while knowing that given the imperfect circumstances, they all must be taken with large grains of salt, just as any TNs must be taken, really, at any time and under any condition.
That’s the Parkerist argument, but it’s not true. There are many cases where food not only makes the wine more hedonically pleasurable but also reveals facets of it you would not experience without food.
What you wrote is completely consistent with what I wrote.
If the food effects the way one tastes the wine, then one’s experience of the wine will be different from the experience of someone who drinks the wine with a different sort of food. Hence your tasting note with food A will not necessarily apply to the wine if drunk with food B. (Or without food at all).
This isn’t a bad thing, it just makes the tasting note “imperfect” in the sense that it won’t apply across the board. But this is just to say that there’s no perfect way to taste wine.