Quite tight, hint of crushed blueberry but mostly dominant oak nose. If tasted blind, I would have said a cal cult. The palate is rather lean and ending with mouth coating tannin with hint of bitterness. About 30 minutes later, it gets silkier and gains more weight.
Second day, more noticeable jammy sweet fruit, cassis and coffee. A bit more chewy but remained pretty tight. 95 pts.
Nice notes Kevin, but i have to ask you…Why would you want to open a wine that you know is a decade away from hitting it’s sweet spot? Seems like a waste to me even though it came through for you on the second day.
Hi Kevin,
Your tasting note on the 2005 Pape Clement sounds identical to mine, but given that, I had a hard time finding 95 points worth of pleasure in the “hint of crushed blueberry but mostly dominant oak” aromatics and astringent finish of this wine. I honestly wonder if this wine will ever come around, given its current profile, and do not think that one can find confidence in how past vintages of Pape Clement have aged, as there has been a fundamental shift here stylistically and the brilliant wines made here in the past are clearly not applicable in attempting to handicap how this wine will evolve. It breaks my heart to see Pape Clement made in this clumsy style today, as I have lots of older vintages of this wine in my cellar and have had the pleasure to taste PC back into the '40s. IMO, no matter how the '05 eventually turns out, it will never deliver the same qualities as recent wines such as the '90, '89, '88 '86, '85, let alone the magical wines made here in vintages such as 1970, 1964, 1961 and 1959- all of which I have tasted in the last year and which are utterly magical and classic expressions of Graves. Even if the 2005 can win the race against the very heavy load of lumber it is carrying (and I for one do not think that there is any certainty in this regard, given its astringency today), as you observed in your note, it is most likely to end up as some sort of stylistic hybrid of Graves and New World Cult Cabernet. For me this is a pretty dramatic fall from its previous style.
Best,
John
Yes, it sounds pretty terrible from Kevin’s note, and I also have to agree the wine is not by any means 10 years away from hitting its sweet spot - its sweet spot, if you find this style sweet, is probably now. The '98 Pape-Clement was explosive on release and is now hollowing out and totally anonymous. It might turn out OK but if that’s going to happen it’ll need another 10 years or so… and of course it might not turn out OK, and the time to drink it was 2000-2001. Same story with the 2000.
Steve,
I tend to buy at least a case per wine and like to observe the evolution. Bob seemed to really like this wine at the 05 bordeaux EWS and just wanted to check.
Hi John,
I believe I met you at the cellar of Coche Dury now a couple years ago.
The 05 Pape Clement definitely is a very technical wine but the material is definitely there. The wine was still intact on the fourth day which to me shows the balance and the core fruit concentration. To me this is a better and ageable version of the recent Smith Haut Laffites, highly extracted with very new world like oak expression.
2000 and 2001 that I tasted recently have nice fruit expression, highly extracted but still shows very slight hint of green. They are very enjoyable now and will last for at least another twenty years or more. IMHO, this will never become a great wine as in 1959 Haut Brion as there definitely is something missing. However, it is an impressive wine, until you look deeper. It is made to please and to impress and it does a great job at it. I believe this is what sells.
Regards,
Kevin
Keith,
It is one thing to not like this style but it is not correct to state that this wine is at the peak. This type of wine will show really well at the initial release but will be awkward or not as expressive at this stage. As posted earlier, I recently tasted 2000 and 2001 and they are showing well.
FWIW, I had a 375ml of the 2003 Pape Clement a year ago, and I LOVED it!
I agree with John and Keith. I find recent Pape Clement to be muddled, oaky and disappointing. This maybe a Bordeaux vs Burgundy thing, but I know the vineyard is capable of showing wines with distinctive character. Maybe this can still happen with enough cellar time, but these low acid oaky wines are not for me. Kevin’s note sounds spot on. When I read it I hear “run for the hills” not “95 pts”.
Kevin, do you like this wine or is this one of these wines that people think is “objectively” of high quality while no one actually wants to drink it?
Well, how do you know it will get any better? It very well might be at its peak (or past it). Nobody has ever had a 20-year-old Pape-Clement made in the current style. It may turn out to be awesome, and it may turn out to be a piece of crap. You compared it to the Cali cult style - I haven’t had a lot of those, but I’ve had a bunch and they are uniformly better at age 3 than they are at age 10 or more.
I also agree with John about the magic of the pre-Magrez Pape-Clements, some of which are in the same league as or even better than Haut-Brions of the same year, and I have to wonder if it ain’t broke, why “fix” it.
Keith,
I have to disagree with you here. There are MANY Cali cults that taste better with significant age. Hobbs Beckstoffer is downright harsh in it’s youth but becomes so much better with age. The same can be said with Phelps Insignia, PM Les Pavots, Dominus, Dunn, Quilceda (though not CA), and many others. Now while these may not be considered the “fruit bomb” CA cults and more along the Bordeaux style, they are “cultish” and serve as a counterpoint to your statement. Will the Pape Clement improve with age? Who knows. I think Kevin is correct in stating it has the stuffing but the components may just need time to integrate. I look first for fruit, then acid, then tannin (in that order) when attempting to guess the cellar life of a wine. I do pay attention to the level of oak but often the wood, regardless of the level of oak, subsides and integrates nicely. I guess time will tell.
Can’t agree with any of that. First, of the wines you’ve listed, Quilceda is the only one even arguably in the “cult” genre - some of the others are downright classic. The only thing they have in common is that they’re all pretty expensive. That’s not what people mean when they talk about California cult wines - they are referring to a specific genre that gained traction in the '80s and '90s with wines like Grace, Harlan, Bryant, Screaming Eagle, etc. Second, looking “first for fruit, then acid, then tannin (in that order) when attempting to guess the cellar life of a wine” is an extremely simplistic approach to an extremely complicated question which would cause you to guess wrong about the numerous intensely fruited wines that do not age and the numerous near-fruitless wines that do. In my opinion the only thing that has ever been a reliable prognosticator of ageability is knowledge of the track record of previous vintages of the same wine, provided it’s still made in pretty much the same way.
Hi Kevin,
Was the Coche-Dury visit the one where a number of us stood around waiting for a sommelier or two from Paris to show up for more than a few minutes?
In any case, I fully understand why the folks at Pape Clement changed their style- to get better reviews from Bob Parker and Steve Tanzer, so that they could raise their price and make more money- all perfectly logical if one owns a great chateau for the sole purpose of making more money. Of course, one could make a lot more smuggling arms to insurgents or selling drugs to young hotshots, rather than selling wine, if making money was all this was about. But in my view, owning a great property in Bordeaux should be more of a custodial arrangement with equal attention paid towards protecting the legacy of the estate, rather than simply trying to maximize the return on investment in the short term- if in the course of maximizing that short-term return they end up damaging the legacy of their property. In this regard, I think that at least amongst those of us who knew and understood the legacy of historical brilliance at Pape Clement, built upon a serious line up of great vintages nurtured since at least the post WWII period, the damage to the Pape Clement “brand” (for lack of a better term) is incalculable.
Pape Clement would not have been an attractive investment in the first place except for the hard work and uncompromising commitment to quality on the part of earlier owners of the estate down through the centuries-with whatever means might have been at their disposal. To treat such earlier generations’ sacrifices as immaterial because they do not correspond to the rather debatable palate predilections of a couple of Bordeaux reviewers who ought to know better (given their vast experience), solely so that greater sums of money can be made, is to my mind an egregiouos error on the part of the current management and utterly disrespectful of the people who have owned and made Pape Clement down through the years. I am also of the opinion that in terms of long-term investment it is also a propostion for losing money- but time will tell on that score.
In any event, I would not be so worried if it were another property- take l’Angelus for example- where I had never previously had a great bottle of wine from the estate before the style was changed in 1988, and hence do not feel the same profound sense of loss- but Pape Clement really has made some of Bordeaux’s greatest wines in some of those vintages that I mentioned earlier. That they have not been more widely recognized for their brilliance says more about the sophistication of commentators than it does about the quality of the wines, IMO. But find yourself a well-stored bottle of the '64 or the '88 and take them out for a test drive and I suspect you will start to see that something pretty special was already in place before the sea change in style here. Your mention of '59 Haut Brion here is particularly germane, as IME, Pape Clement has been the most profound, terroir-driven chateau in the Graves after Haut Brion, during the post-war period, and to my mind it clearly ranked up there with Domaine de Chevalier (another sad casualty of late in the stylistic claret wars) as the very best of the commune after Haut Brion. And to shift winemaking styles to emphasize powerful fruit and new oak at the expense of one of the most evocative expressions of terroir in all of Bordeaux is borderline criminal to my mind.
But your observation that the 2005 Pape Clement “is an impressive wine”, as “it is made to please and to impress and it does a great job at it” and “I believe this is what sells” is on one level certainly true, though I would beg to differ as to the real causes of why the wine sells. I would argue that it is the score of the wine from Messieurs Parker and Tanzer that sells the wine, rather than the new style of the wine itself, that actually moves the juice through the pipeline. The wine could be absolutely identical stylistically, but affixed with a mid-70s score and not sell a single box to those that place faith in those scores. Now I have not bothered to pay attention to Robert Parker in 15 years (not since his dubious miscall of the 1993 red Burgundy vintage and his rather boorish accusations about the Burgundians that accompanied his sour grapes commentary on the vintage), so I had no idea that the 2005 Pape Clement was one of his darlings of the vintage prior to tasting it- but I did bring along with me a pretty deep level of experience with the past great vintages of Pape Clement. And I could not help but be seriously disappointed by the sea change in style of this wine- particularly given that 2005 clearly supplied some of the most incredible raw materials that the Bordelais have had in decades and decades.
As you noted, the 2005 Pape Clement may have enough stuffing to eventually integrate its new wood more completely than is the case now, but that will most likely never translate into a great Pape Clement that would deserve a place amongst the pantheon of the '59, '61, '64 etc, even if it manages to somehow suck up all its new wood with time. Of course this is all speculation at this point in time, but I am much happier to have a pile of '86, '88, '89 and '90 Pape Clement waiting in the wings (that clearly will be deserving of their places amongst the greatest Pape Clements of the 20th century), rather than having to hope on a wing and a prayer that somehow this new style at Pape Clement will manage not to obliterate all of the profoundly beautiful underlying terroir as it struggles to straighten up from underneath its heavy load of lumber and micro-oxygenation.
I do not mean to be impolite and rain on your parade at all about the 2005 Pape Clement (and please do not misconstrue my comments as doing so), as I fully understand that you could find the wine very enjoyable. But I would be willing to bet that if you go out and put together a little vertical of older vintages of Pape Clement, you might go down in the cellar, look that case of 2005 in the eye and think about how many cases of older vintages of Pape Clement that could turn into with just a bit of auctioneering 
It is just that Pape Clement has been for decades one of my favorite properties in all of Bordeaux, and I have cellared and drunk a significant quantity of this chateau over the years, and so your post hit a chord for me, as I much prefer the old style at this estate and profoundly lament the sea change that has taken place.
All the best,
JOhn
Hi Justin,
I like your comments about trying to handicap young wines by looking at their constituent components, and for many years I was very much in your camp in looking at depth of fruit first, followed by structural elements such as acidity and tannin, followed by oak integration etc. But over time, I have tried to do a couple of things to fine tune this approach- with one being to consider how older wines that I taste and which have aged brilliantly might have been in terms of these components when they were young; and two- to try and consider how the depth of fruit in the young wine I am tasting was arrived at these days, given the wide number of options available for deriving this perception available to vignerons in the modern age.
To start with the second point first, I have found that one of the most useful tools for discerning a wine’s depth of fruit is to try and differentiate between concentration of fruit (or what I like to call intensity of flavor) and extraction- for one comes from good husbandry in the vineyards, and the other comes from various winemaking approaches in the cellar. IME, the former is very important for handicapping a wine’s potential ability to age gracefully, while the latter is a bit of winemaking mis-direction and is really completely immaterial to extrapolating how the wine will age. I have had so many examples of heavily extracted wines that have simply fallen apart with bottle age that today I generally assume that if the wine is heavily extracted (or derives its perception of depth of fruit from other winemaking practices like late harvesting, higher alcohol, malo in new oak, residual sugar, specific cultured yeasts or extraction enzymes), then it will not age well, despite its appearance early on in its evolution (assuming of course that there is no relevant track record of aging of older vintages already available with the wine). One of the most difficult things to differentiate between is depth of fruit caused by high quality viticulture and extraction caused by cellar parlor tricks.
To touch upon the first point, I have drunk a lot of great old wine over the years, and I find that the key fundament to so many of these great old wines is a question of balance. Simply put, the vast, vast majority of the very greatest old wines that I have tasted have almost all shared a characteristic of impeccable balance, and this is a quality that I have little doubt that they possessed from day one. And I think that this quality of balance transcends varietal, growing region, winemaking era and a host of other variables, and it is today the thing I look most closely at when trying to ascertain if a wine will age gracefully over a long period in the cellar. I think this can be found in a seriously tannic young wine such as a Bruno Giacosa Barolo “Falletto” or a Mayacamas Cabernet, or in less powerfully endowed wines such as Joseph Drouhin Vosne-Romanee “Petits Monts” or 1985 Chateau Magdelaine- all the great young wines that I believe will age well share impeccable balance from the get go.
Now to get back to the 2005 Pape Clement, what I worry about is both the disequilibrium that the wine currently shows (with the new wood not fully covered on the backend and its tannins rather astringent at the present time) and the copious levels of fruit on display, that do not have a historical link with the previous great old Pape Clements of yesteryear. Consequently, rightly or wrongly, I infer that this perception of depth of fruit has most likely been brought about by cellar technique, rather than high quality vineyard husbandry (though of course this could have been arrived at with both good work in the vineyard and cellar tricks), and my experience leads me to strongly suspect that it will not last sufficiently long enough and prove to be deep enough to eventually carry all its new wood. For the plush, dramatic fruit of the 2005 Pape Clement is diametrically opposite to the rock solid core of sweet fruit in a vintage such as the 1986 Pape Clement- which has never shown a whole lot of generosity to its fruit component, while always being amazingly deep, tightly-wound and an integral part of the wine- and which I have absolutely no doubt will eventually blossom and provide a beautiful mid-palate of pure and concentrated fruit when the wine fully emerges from slumber.
As I noted in my post to Kevin, at this point in time this is all still speculation, and only time will prove or disprove our various theories about how the 2005 Pape Clement will eventually turn out. This is one of the things that makes wine so interesting, as in the end there are only educated guesses built upon our own particular bases of experience and there is no one singular true path of knowledge. But I have drunk more than my fair share of Pape Clements over the years, and plan to enjoy plenty more before my journey is over- but I seriuosly doubt that I will be drinking much 2005 Pape Clement in the future, unless someone serves me one ten years down the road and shows how wrong my assumptions have been! But of course I will be quick to counter with a bottle of the mature '86 out of my cellar to still show that the old style was better
Best Regards,
John
No; it was the time I ran into you as well at Coche’s cellar.
Kevin,
I find it interesting that agreeing with my TN, some thinks my rating is too low and others think that it is too high. I fully expected that the wine would not show well but I like to follow the evolution.
I recently have enjoyed the 00 and 01. I don’t think the wine is structured to improve for 50+ years but I also don’t think the 00 is dead as Keith stated. Both of the wines were in 93-95 pts range. So answering your question, this is not a 95 pts wine in pleasure scale at this moment but certainly the wine that I would like to try in five to ten years from now. Based on the boards response there are plenty of people who appreciate and love the wine. The ones who do not prefer seem to be the minority.
P.S. I recently enjoyed a bottle of the 01 Les Clos from Raveneau at Taillevent. This was extremely tight with almost painful acidity but had the core concentration. I would rated the wine 97+pts.
Keith,
I will be forty two soon but I was lucky enough to start drinking wines early and so I have been drinking wines for the past 25 years. At this stage of my life, I trust my palate as it may be at the peak, ie experience and palate precision. I have drunk a lot of young wines as well as the older ones. My reference point for the PC’s ageability would be the 95 Valandraud or the 96 La Mondott although the evolution may not exactly mirror these two wines. IMO, although the 05 Pape Clement seems tight, it will evolve a lot quicker than the 05 left bank wines as well as the 05 Pavie and the 05 Ausone. However, it will age and it will become a crowd pleaser.
To clarify my statement ‘If tasted blind, I would have said a cal cult.’, I meant that the nose at this stage was like a cal cab but not the palate. Based on my past experience, as Bordeauxs age they remain distinctively Bordeaux. So I wasn’t implying that this is like a cal cab. Also, contrary to what you stated the 91-94 Araujos and Harlans are beautiful wines that I would love to drink and they are getting close to the 20 year mark.
I happened to love Burgundy as well as leaner ‘terrior’ driven wines as much as the next guy. However, it is not everyone who loves ash, scorched earth, leaner wines without the core fruit expression (Eg, I love the 70s Domaine de Chevalier. I am certain that the 59s and 61s are great wines per John). I don’t recall drinking a lot of older Pape Clements but it appears as there was a dry spell at Pape Clement, so it was clearly broke.
Just to be clear, I didn’t suggest the 2000 was dead, only that if you enjoy this kind of wine, there is a very good probability that you will not enjoy it at any point in the future as much as you enjoyed it 5 years ago.
John,
You weren’t being impolite at all as I was simply posting my TN. As I stated before, although I like the wine, I don’t think it will be a great wine. It is ironical that my initial thought when posting this thread was that perhaps Bob was overly generous.
Although I admire the long history of Bordeaux, I thought Bordeaux chateaus were always commercial enterprises. In regards to the legacy and the reputation, Pape Clement today is more reputable than during the previous owner’s regime, clearly not by those who loved the traditional style of Pape Clement.
Without knowing the full history of Pape Clement, I feel that you have very romantic view of the Chateau per your statement
‘Pape Clement would not have been an attractive investment in the first place except for the hard work and uncompromising commitment to quality on the part of earlier owners of the estate down through the centuries-with whatever means might have been at their disposal.’.
You may disagree with the stylistic change but the current owner, I believe, has reduce the yield and invested as much as any previous owners in order to improve the quality of the wine.
This discussion reminds me of those good old days with Bob Callahan at WLDG.
Cheers,
Kevin
Keith,
Are you saying that the 2000 PC now is not as good as five years ago? Any high end Bordeauxs at age four are really awkward so I dont get your point.