1998 Château Lafite Rothschild- France, Bordeaux, Médoc, Pauillac (10/21/2011) WS NY Wine Experience 5th Floor (Marriott Marquis Times Square): My first Lafite. ZOMFG nose–haunting, enchanting, mesmerizing. I couldn’t quite say it was anything other than the standard blackcurrant/tobacco/pencil Bordeaux mix, but with a wild intensity and staying power. I smelled this across the room, I smelled this when I left the tasting, I smelled this at the bar aftewards, I smelled this even when I was shoving pizza down my throat at 3 AM. And then I smelled it in my dream. And the wine had a heartwarming elegance and softness. This isn’t quiite in its drinking window–the tannin still overpowers the fruit and obscures the tertiary characteristics–but that shouldn’t take long to come into balance, just a few years. Believe the hype: there’s a reason people part with their life savings for this wine. (94 pts.)
This was the only great wine I had at the tasting–the other Bordeauxs were too young, and most everything else was too spoofy–but this sure made up for it. I wish I had known they would stop serving at 9pm so I could have gone back for seconds and thirds.
Dan, great note… used to have a few of these but alas the price escalation made them bottles that had to go. I agree though that lafite on the nose has an elegance to it that is quite enchanting.
Same here. I bought a 6-pack en-primeur and sold the lot a few months ago. Before that I had never sold anything other than purging my cellar of anything containing Grenâche about five years ago, but the prospect of a 1000% return on my investment was just too tempting. I’m sure it will be a great Bordeaux one day, but at the end of the day it’s just that: Bordeaux.
Glad you got to experience Lafite. But I think you’ve let your excitement get the better of you on a few key things. First, nobody who is buying Lafite now is parting with their life savings for it. They are very wealthy people (or speculators planning to sell it to very wealthy people) who can buy Lafite as thoughtlessly as most of us can buy a pack of gum. Nothing wrong with that, but don’t use that as a basis for surmising that the stuff is so transcendent that people are making major sacrifices to get it, because that’s not the case. Second, you say “believe the hype,” but I wonder, what hype? Sure, Lafite still gets high scores from the usual magazines that get their samples for free, but that’s true about a lot of wines and doesn’t really qualify as hype, which I think tends to connote more of a grassroots kind of excitement. For there to be hype about a wine, there has to be people drinking it. And people don’t drink Lafite anymore, they sell it, and the people they’re selling it to don’t drink it, either; they either sell it on or give it as a gift. Yours has to be the first Lafite tasting note I’ve read on this board in many a moon. The fact is, the reason Lafite sells for the prices it’s been getting lately has nothing to do with its being so amazing that people will part with their life savings to get it, or with there being so much hype that people can’t resist its siren’s song - the real reason is fashion, pure and simple. It’s a fashionable brand in a certain sector in a certain People’s Republic. Before that happened - as recently as a few years ago - the going rate for the top vintages was as little as $200-$300 and you could get the lesser vintages such as the 1998 for even less than that. (I remember drinking this on release from a half-bottle I bought from Zachys for about $50, which felt like a splurge at the time.) Anyway, like I said, glad you liked the wine, but let’s not lose all sense of perspective. (But I have to say, if you really feel like you have to go this gaga over a wine, doesn’t it deserve more than 94 points?! I’m definitely not parting with my life savings for anything less than a 100.)
Thanks for the thoughtful response, Keith. My phrasing about life savings and hype was largely rhetorical. What I meant to say is that I get the sense it’s become fashionable to trash Lafite because it’s become a status symbol and its price has been driven into the stratosphere. I just wanted to share with the board that it’s worth remembering there actually is a fantastic wine lurking beneath the label. I wouldn’t pay $1,000 for this bottle, or any bottle for that matter. But if you have already decided that you are going to pay $1,000 for a bottle, this wine (though preferably from a stronger Pauillac vintage and at maturity rather than early adolescence) is probably one of the better options.
As for the score: First, I’ve only been drinking wine seriously for about a year and a half, so I am trying to score conservatively to leave the top end of the scale open for even-yet-greater wines I haven’t had the pleasure to try yet. I often go back and adjust my scores retrospectively as I drink more wine and get a better sense of how wines stack up against each other. Second, I don’t know nearly enough to begin to predict how wines will evolve more than a few years out, so I score exclusively on current drinking, not potential. The nose on this Lafite was indeed off-the-charts great. But the smell is only half the battle. In the mouth it was definitely good, but clearly too young–there was just a bit too much tannin for the palate to really come through. The only other wine I’ve had with a nose to rival this was a 1983 Cheval Blanc. But with an extra 15 years of bottle age (if nothing else) that wine tasted just as great as it smelled. Maybe the Lafite will turn into something similarly great and complete someday, but maybe it won’t. Hopefully I’ll be lucky enough to try it again and find out.
Mike wrote:
“but at the end of the day it’s just that: Bordeaux”
What a terrible racist you are Mike!
Dan,
That was a wonderful tasting note. Great to see such passion. The ONLY problems with great Bordeaux are that
A, they take 10,15, 20 years or longer to age
B, they now cost so damn much
But, where there’s a will, there’s a way. There are good old wines out there in the pipe line if you know where to look. And there are excellent “mid-range” wines selling for a fraction of the great growths.
Memo to self: Must not get baited by Alex, must not get baited by Alex…
All kidding aside, there is no denying that Bordeaux is -and will remain for the foreseeable future- the most important wine region in the world from a commercial point of view. As for the wines, I have drunk/tasted plenty and even liked some in the past, but mostly in the previous century when my palate was still under construction. A few pre-1975 examples aside, they never really did it for me, which is of course more personal preference than anything else.
I do abhor however, the insane hype spun around the en-primeur campaign each year and the seemingly never-ending price spiral the most reputed wines have fallen victim to. Lafite-Rothschild is of course the poster child for this phenomenon, but there is no denying that it is a great wine. Speaking of insane hype, there’s a lot of that going on in Burgundy as well…
I think there’s still value to be had in Bordeaux. Precisely because of the aforementioned hype machine, prices for recent vintages, which won’t be ready to drink for a decade, are as high or in many cases even higher than those for wines now at peak. And no one seems terribly interested in wines from the fallow years between the two benchmark vintages (1962-81).
If you’re more interested in tertiary complexity than blackcurrant power, mid-range classified growths from the solid-if-unspectacular vintages in this range ('62, '66, '70, '71, '75, '78, and '79 to my knowledge) can provide a world of enjoyment for $70 or so. You have to be more selective at the top end, because many of the best estates were going through tough times in this period. But those that weren’t–Latour, Cheval Blanc, and the two Haut Brions–produced some major league wines that are quite accessibly priced compared to their successors in 1982 and after (although not compared to their mature counterparts from California). I’ve had 1970 Haut Brion and 1978 La Mission, and those are both stellar bottles available for $200-$250.
Moreover, I’ve been very impressed with the sturdiness of Bordeaux–in my personal experience it seems like you can grab any old random bottle on the secondary market, and even if it has a suboptimal fill and the capsule and label are totally degraded the wine will show A-OK. (That couldn’t be more different than Italy, the country I follow and buy the most, where it seems like over half the bottles over age 15 have been fried).
Look, Bordeaux ain’t cheap, and it has been ground zero for many of the ugliest trends in the wine world in recent years, both in terms of viticulture and marketing. But I’m yet to find another wine region that can put me in a completely different place, season, and state of mind with a mere whiff.
You baited Bordeaux lovers, I baited you, but I still love you to bits and would spend a week with you again in Burgundy at the drop of a hat .
I just don’t understand this partisanship. It smacks of closed minds and superficial understanding. I say that because with at least 6,000 estates in Bordeaux you have a whole gamut of styles - and they’re not all made from just one grape variety.
Burgundy does some things better, Bordeaux does other things better. That’s why I have both in my cellar and wish to further my understanding of Burgundy.
I accept, of course, many of the criticisms of Bordeaux at the top end, but there is an eternal and infinitely frustrating confusion between the great growths and the other 95% of Bordeaux!
Dan’s post is spot on.
Few people in Bordeaux know Burgundy, but you rarely hear the sniping that you sometimes hear from Burgundy lovers with regard to Bordeaux. I wonder why?
I think it’s because there’s so little of Burgundy that it is far less available and thus often becomes almost a cult thing.
In reference to the initial post, Lafite Rothschild is on the top step of the podium of the world’s greaest wines, along with the likes of Chambertin or Romanée Conti.
It’s just bad grapes to say otherwise in my most humble opinion…
So true. The only wine I’ve ever sold was 00 Lafite. I knew it was probably exquisite, but I had to consider, “how many exquisite bottles of wine can I purchase for the price of one of these?”
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