I’m giving a score for these because if two wines show similarly, that’s not a flaw, that’s just how the wine has aged.
2004 Les Plantiers du Haut-Brion- France, Bordeaux, Graves, Pessac-Léognan (4/1/2016)
Oxidized. Drinkable, but just barely. (80 pts.)
2004 Les Plantiers du Haut-Brion- France, Bordeaux, Graves, Pessac-Léognan (4/1/2016)
Bottle #2 consistent with first bottle. Oxidized. Drinkable, but just barely. Infuriating that I bought 3 of these and the first two are shot despite sound corks. (80 pts.)
Aabalat. Purchased this winter, arrived last week. They look immaculate and don’t show any signs of being compromised. Just have the frayed finish and sherried nose of premox. Sadly, they otherwise seem like lovely, textbook semillons.
The next bottle was spectacular. Incredibly concentrated and mineral, great mouthwatering acid, honey and marzipan, a ripe, minty nose with a good dose of coconut oak (but not out of place given the concentration). Wow!
I don’t know if this makes me feel better or worse about the shot bottles . . .
If so its a one off, I haven’t found White BdX to have those issues in any wide spread manner… It’s normally just a bit more often than corked btls, obviously with more oxing than premoxing as the age gets up there…and I’d assume for this vintage o my super perfectly poured bottles (as well as perfect transport to the US) will eliminate this from being quite variably… As this wasn’t meant to age like HB Bl especially with a vintage for whites like 04…
Sounds like that last bottle was a screamer! Aged white wine… Always seems to be a crapshoot eh?
I’ve noted before that I’ve probably had even worse luck percentage-wise with Bordeaux Blanc from 1996 on than white Burgs. Bottles from same cases of 1996 Laville HB, 2001 Plantiers HB, & 2001 La Louviere were mixed- some very oxidized, some advanced, some fresh as a daisy.
Recently opened some 2001 DDC- drinkable, but older seeming that the '83 is currently.
IME, white Bordeaux has had the same issues across the board with premox as white Burgundy since the 1994 vintage (which was probably also the year that it started in Burgundy, but due to the indifferent quality of the whites there no one really noticed). Sadly, 1994 was a brilliant year for white Bordeaux, but the wines premoxed, as has each subsequent vintage since that time. I am not really sure why the issue has not been associated with white Bordeaux more widely in the minds of collectors, but perhaps this is just a reflection of the smaller percentage of the market owned by white Bordeaux and the quite small quantitites produced of the top wines. As is the case with white Burgundies, the last year of white Bordeaux that has aged correctly is 1993 (the vintage is very, very good and cruising along in a classically glacial pace), and since then it has been classic premox bottle variation since 1994 forwards. I have had to cook with a lot of really good 2001s in particular, which again was a superb vintage for white Bordeaux and still have a few in the cellar. Every once in a while we hit a pristine bottle that behaves as David’s third bottle of the 2004 Plantiers, but most often they are over the hill. Back in the good old days, you could age white Bordeaux from top producers like DDC or Pape Clement longer than white Burgundies, and I recently had some great bottles of DDC Blanc from 1983 back into the early 1970s that were pure magic. Like white Burgundy and other heavily premoxed regions, a great category of complex, vibrant and fully mature white Bordeaux has been lost since '93 and the causes of the issue remain unsolved. As someone mentioned above, Plantiers (the second label of Haut-Brion Blanc) does not have the potential longevity of HBB, but in a world without premox, the wine typically has at least a twenty year window of drinkability and the '04 would still be young, vibrant and a shining example of just how beautiful white Bordeaux can be if it escapes the long reach of premature oxidation, Very glad you at least got one good bottle out of your three David!
I just opened a bottle of 2001 DDC that I was planning to have with dinner tonight, but sadly the first whiff showed the tell-tale apple juice aromas. This is my first pre-moxed white Bordeaux, and since I have a bunch of 01s, I worry that it may not be my last.
FWIW (not very much), I believe Plantiers was, at that time, the second label of both HBB and LHBB (i.e., they blended the leftovers from both estates)