+1
What a poor saying… 
Wow, Christopher, do you ever have the wrong end of the stick!
First of all, as others have pointed out, you have no right to censure me. Jeff Leve and I have a mutual disadmiration society, but I must say I thank him for sticking up for this principle.
Second, the saying I posted about HBL was a humorous one that is in no way critical!!!
Look at the price of Mouton, then LB, then HBL.
There is no implication whatsoever that the wine is substandard. Rather that it is good value for money, which pretty much hits the nail on the head.
Jeez, you need to lighten up.
As for 2000 HBL, I am free to write my impressions, even if they contradict yours!!!
There’s a saying you may have heard “There are no great wines, only great bottles”.
I fully accept that there are bum bottles out there. Mine may very well have been atypical.
It is entirely possible that if you had a significant quantity of the wine, that your appreciation is more accurate then mine.
I freely admit this.
I recently wrote a review for a Michelin-starred restaurant on Trip Advisor. I have eater there 4 or 5 times. But the most recent time was a disaster.
I described my experience, but said that they probably were just having a bad day, and that I’d have to go back again soon to see if things were better i.e. as good as previous meals.
By the same token, Christopher, if I share a negative impression of a wine, I have no inflated opinion of myself. That wine may be better on another occasion. Such things as bottle variation exist and, as you point out, storage and provenance play an important role. In addition, no one is above being served a wine he dissed later on and finding it delicious…
So, please calm down. We both love wine and both love Bordeaux. I’m not into smearing anyone’s reputation, just writing (expletive deleted) tasting notes!
I might add that, seeing as I love to broaden my horizons, I rarely buy by the case.
That is why some people on forums such as this, or on Cellartracker, are better informed and more on target than professional critics, a group, by the way, I do not consider myself to belong to.
Best regards,
Alex R.
Yes, it’s just wine. Alex is a scholar and a gentleman.
But to be frank, this is some of the best copy HBL might hope to get on a wine board! I’ve thought more about this Chateau reading this thread than I have in ages.
Well it took me a while but I found them. I’ll try to open one of these this weekend, and before I post a note-yes, they were bought on release (not futures) and have been well stored.
HBL has long been an underachiever. The idea that a 2000 cru classe is at peak right now tells you all you need to know. Most of the higher quality wines still have quite a bit of development to go through.
I think that’s a little strong. And, I think the reviewer in question would be the first to admit the limitations of his influence on the good standing of any one domaine. Not many, if any have the power to take anyone down. If anything, the power of this board – and many others – is to temporarily cause a buying frenzy in the short to intermediate term.
TL;DR: It’s all good, bro.
Alex, after reading more of your post today, in particular your recent posts from the past months, I have to admit that overall your have a damn nice blog called the Bordeaux Wine Blog. Your write about Bordeaux wines with vivid descriptions, well structured articles, that are informative and add to a readers knowledge about Bordeaux wine. Your “about” section of your blog outlines your impressive wine background. The articles and reviews you have written show you to be incredibly knowledgeable about Bordeaux, and although you say you are not a professional critic, the way you approach the subject matter is in my opinion, that of a professional. This may shock you, but I think your Blog provides valuable insight to those who wish to know more about Bordeaux. From what I read the overwhelming majority of what you write about Bordeaux is spot on. However, as I believe that you are holding yourself out to be a wine professional is why I have gone on a soapbox about your March 2016 bashing of the 2000 HBL and the its ageability. You published in your Blog your “impressions” of one bottle of an older Bordeaux that had been released more than a decade prior to you tasting the wine. Based on this singular impression of the 2000 HBL, you wrote an incredibly negative bash on the 2000 HBL noting that the wines from HBL should be drunk on the young side. My criticism is of your criticism of this wine, the 2000 HBL. You jumped from a singular impression to Blog expressing extreme negativity about a particular vintage of wine without considering the essential component when one reviews an older wine; that is, has this wine been properly stored and is it tasting like overly tertiary wimpy oily plonk because this is how this particular wine in general tastes, or is this one bottle not representative of the vintage being tasted. Although you express that you are not a wine professional, my soap box criticism is that I think you are a wine professional when I view your background and body of blog work, and that you should be ready to be called out for bashing an older wine without properly vetting the provenance of the wine. When you fail to consider provenance before you go negative on an older Bordeaux, you are not being the “champion” of Bordeaux wines which is one of two reasons you noted in your about section as to why you started the blog.
I adore Bordeaux and have been drinking it for 30 plus years. You too adore Bordeaux. Why don’t you do HBL a solid and retaste the 2000 HBL? It’s not like I am asking you to stick pins in your arm. I am asking you to take the time to drink a 19 year old HBL that’s been properly stored at the Chateau. Trust me, it’s not punishment. Drinking the 2000 HBL will be enlightenment.
Furthermore, if you get to Philly, I will set up a tasting and provide over 20 different 2000 vintage Bordeaux for you, me and 10 other Berserkers to try. Your impression of the 2000 vintage in general might also change.
Christopher,
Well, it looks like civilized discourse here, which suits me just fine .
One of the things I have learned about fine Bordeaux after all this time is that ageworthiness is not the yardstick by which it should be measured. Another is that there is a lot going for Bordeaux consumed younger than many wine lovers, especially English-speaking ones, consider necessary. The 2000 vintage is a case in point. In my opinion – certainly not yours, and that’s fine – the majority of these wines (OK, just to be clear, great growth wines…) are fine now, at age 19.
Describing a wine as best consumed on the young side is not at all damning in my book. My experience with HBL, which I taste fairly often, is just that. Let’s take value for money into consideration. A cru classé Pauillac that’s not only good, but a pleasure to drink at age 5 or 10, offers a lot of advantages. I haven’t dismissed the estate by any means. But neither do I consider it in the exalted category, or one destined for the Long Haul.
It’s funny, I can remember when California wines began emerging on the international scene. The Bordelais tasted them, nodded approvingly and opined with condescension that the region “had made considerable progress”… They also found it hard to believe that a Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa could taste that good just 3 and 4 years after the vintage.
Age can improve wine, but it can also betray it.
I find your explanation of why my tasting note is invalid rather murky because it seems obvious to me that anybody’s tasting note is the portrait of a particular bottle of wine on a particular day. To me, it goes without saying that a poor showing can be due to various factors (degree of aeration, serving temperature, bottle variation and, as you point out, provenance). In other words, no one’s tasting notes, unless they have a very swelled head, can be thought of as definitive.
You can be assured that if I had the 2000 HBL on another occasion and it was much better, I would say so on my blog.
As for my not being a champion of Bordeaux, I cannot see how dissing one wine deserves that comment!
I am totally open to new experiences and calling into question previous opinions.
That’s why I love blind tasting.
I thank you for your kind offer of setting up a tasting of HBL in Philadelphia, a city I have only visited once before. However, I’m not likely to travel to the US for some time. If I do, I’ll let you know.
All the best,
Alex R.
Both the blind faith in a completely outdated classification system and the faith in the objectivity of ratings systems, especially the allocation of points by so called experts, make it impossible to taste a wine free of prejudice. Unfortunately, still too many people are not aware of this fact and remain victims of systems, which are, first of all, extremely useful for the leading estates, a few ‘experts’, and a few people from the trade, but not for the consumer. Meaningless points, but also stupid sayings like “a poor man’s” whatever are grossly misleading and insults to the wines in question.
Rudi,
I see that you, too, have taken a humorous saying quite literally and been upset.
Insulting? Oh, c’mon, and there is more than a grain of truth in it.
Alex R.
This thread is a powerful reminder to at least one of the reasons why so many critics stopped publishing their negative tasting notes. It’s all so much easier when everyone gets an A and a prize!
No doubt, this thread is a total downer.
Alex, I think that the main component of me being strongly critical of your one review, tasting note, whatever you call it, is that it is contained in what looks to be a well thought out blog that is focused on Bordeaux. It’s my belief that wine Bloggers, in particular, a wine blogger that predominantly writes about one type or region of wine, have the same kind of ethical responsibilities as does someone who is getting paid for expressing their opinions about wine. Unlike tasting notes on a site such as WB, your impression gets publicly extrapolated into an opinion on the blog that you control. Unlike tasting notes here on WB, anyone who googles “2000 Chateau Haut Bages Liberal” would most likely be given your blog post on the first page of google hits. On my computer you come in as number 6, and right behind you is a hit on Jeff’s web site. So essentially, your blog post is something that the internet lends credibility to, as your blog opinion is one that theoretically would come to the attention of anyone google researching this particular wine. Additionally, this particular blog post can’t be tempered with responses by readers, as your blog lacks a comment section.
Interesting, that’s exactly how I found your blog post on the 2000 HBL! I am enough of a wine nerd that I have been educating my children about wine since they very little. It was the first time that my daughters were going to have the HBL so I did a google search, and came across your review. I remember the discourse about the wine and the showing her a few of the reviews and information about HBL in general (yeah, here’s some positive vibes towards Jeff) and we looked at Jeff’s web page and your post. We had already drunk some of the wine which was opened up after a decant, and my daughter asked, (and I am paraphrasing as I don’t remember all of her exact words) “Dad, why is this guy describing the wine as being really awful. It’s a great wine that has so much fruit. Why is he trashing the wine.” (I do recall that she used the word trashing) I replied with something like…well, he must have had an badly stored or tainted wine, but I don’t know why he would write a review like this on a Bordeaux blog when it clearly is of a flawed wine. So what did I do on Christmas night of 2016 finishing up at 8:22 pm? I wrote you an email Alex. A nicely worded email. It included this…
Thus, perhaps you would consider pulling your 2000 HBL review, as I strongly believe that you did not have a representative bottle of this particular vintage. If you can try a bottle from the estate, I am confidant that you will understand my perspective.
In closing, please don’t take this email in a bad way, as I am not putting you down, as you are clearly someone with an extraordinary amount of wine knowledge. I just felt like you really should have “my input” about the 2000 HBL.
I recognize that you might not have read my email. If I had to bet, I would say that you probably received this email. And to those who say it is wrong to ask a Blog reviewer (not a WB reviewer) to pull a wine review, you are entitled to your opinion. I believe that someone who has a Bordeaux blog, who lists their contact email, who lists on their about page a mission statement about being passionate about Bordeaux, a champion of Bordeaux, should be contacted and requested to retry a wine if they have a strongly negative review of a wine that readily appears to be of a flawed bottle of particular vintage.
Candidly, what I don’t understand from your responses Alex is why would you NOT want to incredibly soon re-taste the 2000 HBL? Anyone can bash me for being rough on you, but I find this to be questionable ethics, and frankly, how do you satisfy or advance your mission statement by letting your current review of the 2000 HBL stand without disclaimers that what you tasted back in early 2016 readily appears to be a non-representative version of how 2000 HBL should taste? What’s so bad about saying “hey, you know what, I am going to be up north near HBL in two weeks and I will pick up a bottle and try it! I’ll let you know what I think!”
If your review was a post on Cellar Tracker, most likely within hours, someone would have responded with a comment indicating, “I think you drank a flawed bottle. Check out the other notes on this wine.” (I like how you have not reduced wine to numbers on your blog, as I so agree that a wine is not a number, although numbers have become entrenched with wine reviews) When one adds a tasting note on CT, after you hit add tasting note, among all the boxes to fill out there’s a little box called “bottle was flawed or defective” and if one hits that box, one cannot enter a numerical score that would be factored into the aggregate score of the wine from all reviewers. The little box is a reminder, as it essentially says “hey, sir or madam about to post a review of this wine, if the wine you are about to review is flawed or defective, hit me so that the review is properly categorized, because a defective wine should not affect the overall rating of this wine.” That box is a little red flag to those about to rate a wine, as it gives a reminder to the reviewer that a non representative or flawed wine should be called out as that, so as to not give the wrong impression about a representative bottle of a particular wine. (If one hits the box, the word FLAWED appears instead of a number to the top right of the review. The CT reviews of the 2000 HBL have a couple reviews marked flawed.) Cellar tracker is a wonderful tool for anyone researching older wines, in particular Bordeaux as the Bordeaux posts there are legion. At the very least, it’s a great reference point to help anyone when reviewing an older bottle of a wine to figure out if a wine that is tasting old and wimpish is representative of a properly stored bottle of the wine or a flawed version of a particular wine.
Last thing to note. Your tasting note and your impressions of how the 2000 HBL tasted in early 2016 is not something I disagree with. I fully believe that you have accurately described the wine. My disagreement is how you decided to go from impression to opinion about the 2000 HBL in general, without consideration that your Blog promoted opinion readily appears to be of a flawed and non-representative bottle of 2000 HBL.
Obviously Alex’s real crime was not including a trigger warning in his thread title
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Never in the field of wine criticism was so much written by so few about so little.
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Christopher,
This is a rather hallucinatory conversation.
What in the world is my ”ethical responsibility” you speak of? What can that possibly mean? That people have no right to criticize wines? This is unreal!
If you see an awful film, and you have a blog about movies, you shouldn’t say so?
What is this?
OK, I get the point that storage may have been an issue. You have stated this several times. Are people supposed to dismiss any negative impressions they may have and put them down to poor storage? I don’t think so.
Should they be open to revisiting the same wine and possibly revising their opinion? Well, yes, and I’ve already said so. Do they have a moral obligation to do so? No, because it is deucedly difficult to procure second bottles and life is just too short.
Should their reviews therefore be taken with a grain of salt? Most definitely yes – as is everyone’s opinion, including yours and mine!
I am not in any way ashamed of my tasting note.
You have to tell it the way you see it. That’s the whole point of criticism. That’s what wine blogs are all about.
There is a “comments” section on my site. As far as I know it is active and functioning.
You spoke to me of an e-mail sent about this same 2000 HBL. Well, I never received it. If I had, I would undoubtedly have answered. I’m very good that way . I can’t explain why it never ended up in my in box.
Your daughter wondered why my impressions were apparently diametrically opposed to those of Jeff. Well, is he the gold standard? Don’t people have different tastes? Isn’t this pretty basic and obvious?
You write that you are surprised that I would “not want to incredibly soon re-taste the 2000 HBL”. Well, for starters, it was the only bottle I had!!! If there were any more, and seeing as the bottle I had was clearly past its best, I would have stood it up waiting to be consumed in the near future. But I cannot just snap my fingers and find 20-year-old wines (OK, 19 years…) like that!
I do not think you can presume to say what hypothetical reviewers on Cellartracker would say if they had drunk the same bottle as me… You know, it’s like TripAdvisor. You have all sorts of comments. Sometimes opposite opinions are, in fact, justified. It all depends on context. Wines can be off, just as restaurants can. Please note, however, and to answer your criticism, that the problem I had was not brett or TCA or any classic defect. It was just blah and tired and clearly past its best.
The basic problem with everything you have written in this thread is the following sentence “My disagreement is how you decide to go from impression to opinion about the 2000 HBL in general”.
No, no, and no. You’ve got it all wrong. I simply described a wine I had. Period. I did not claim that it represented the entire production, that it couldn’t be better from someone else’s cellar, that this was the last word. No, not at all. You drew that conclusion all on your own. And it is erroneous.
I don’t think I can go much further with this Christopher.
Alex R.
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I will respond a little later, but my daughter’s opinion about the wine (2000 HBL) that we drank back on Christmas day of 2016 was based on the wonderful nectar that she just tasted, and the smell of the wine that we just drank…a bottle of 2000 HBL that IS representative of how a properly stored bottle of the wine would taste. We went to Jeff’s web site to get the background information about the Chateau. I guess I am going to have to buy you a bottle of the 2000 HBL from the Chateau.
Just as an aside, I was lucky enough to pick up a case of HBL 1990 in perfect condition, many years ago. It was cheap and I didn’t expect fireworks, but every bottle was incredibly good, so much so that we did a direct comparison once with Lynch-Bages 1990, with some friends. Every one of us preferred the HBL, much to our astonishment. This doesn’t say anything about the wines’ relative merits - they were both great wines, but on that particular evening, the HBL showed better. I’ve no doubt that nowadays the placings would be reversed. I’m still waiting for the same depth and concentration from subsequent HBL vintages and with the 90, I think I was just really lucky because I’ve never seen any TN as enthusiastic as mine were.
I remember well the 1990 Haut-Bages Libéral, Julian. It was indeed a splendid wine. A real eye-opener.
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