There is still enough wine around e.g the estates on Dale’s list, and there a few others that I like. But I remain convinced that Bordeaux, it’s viticulture is a pendulum, and we have seen the worst as these wines age and fail to impress. There is an upward swing in our future; it’s a little early to despair.
We differ on wine and tasters. What I liked best about Magdelaine was it was wet, had alcohol and was red. It was all downhill after that. If you see it differently, that’s fine. You think Pavie is boring. I find the best vintages thrilling. There you have it. That clearly demonstrates both our palates.
More importantly, people who like or don’t enjoy wines that critics like or not, are not lemmings because you do not agree with them. That is an insult to everyone who likes those wines. They have palates. They taste the wine and decide what they like based on what is in the glass. Yes, Parker can get the market excited,. But he cannot make people like a wine or not. They make that choice after tasting it all on their own.
Calling people lemmings because they share an affinity with Parker for some wines is just as silly as saying you are a lemming with the group of people that never likes a Parker likes, simply because Parker likes it. I know you well enough to know, you like what you like based on tasting a wine. Others deserve the same courtesy and respect.
Indeed. But yet, there is all this parrying and thrusting with The Uber-Lemming. Was he not clear that that you were speaking nonsense, and did he not rattle shibboleths at you from the official Parker cheat sheet? 
I’ve been on the fence on this issue, but am coming around to Mark’s view on the direction of St. Emilion and some left banks. I’ve reached the point where my last deep foray in to St. Ems was the '05 vintage and I have largely avoided buying much since then while I have continued to buy left banks quite deeply.
There has been a heavy push (call it modernization perhaps) to extract far too much out of the fruit the land gives, crank up the alcohol with late picks and lavish the wine with heavy use of oak and new oak. An unfortunate recent example of a left bank gone awry is the '05 Lascombes. I found it horrible. Would not even score it a 70. A perfectly conditioned bottle, nothing wrong with the wine, just poorly made. I will give my remaining bottles away. Some other really bad examples that I have checked on: 2004 Fleur Cardinale (liked the '05 quite a bit, BTW), 2004 Quinalt l’Enclos, 2008 Barde Haut, 2009 Les Gravieres, 2008 Le Thil. Nothing there but the omnipresence of wood and alcohol; the Les Gravieres tastes like perfume. While I can respect that a well-made St Em has more years to go, checking in at these points only tells me that these wines will not age gracefully and the distractors of wood and alcohol will likely only get worse. The Fleur Cardinale and Quinault were actually decent on release, and the '08 Les Gravieres was decent as well and a nice value (while the '09 Les Gravieres went over the deep edge).
As Rudi elegantly points out, some of these wines are attractive right on release and perhaps during your first glass, but it is tough going after that. I’ve recently enjoyed a '61 Pavie and a '90 Figeac. Oh if we could only turn back the hands to that style of St. Emilion - I would remain mesmerized, like I once was, by that region and its ancient soils.
Sadly, I agree with this paragraph. Sadly, because I love Bordeaux, and have been disappointed/disgusted with so many modern wines over the last few years. For me, the wines in question, I am not even impressed by the first sip. They are just torture right off the bat. There are some positives it seems, to me anyway. These critics’ darlings are the easiest wines in the world to sell. Also, from what I have read about the last few vintages, some of these wineries might be “backing off” a little. I haven’t bought any so I cannot say for sure. BTW I love the 1975 Les Forts. Great wine, and I have never had a Latour that has been better than the Les Forts.
The critics are another sad chapter. They seem to suffer increasingly from professional deformation. They actually believe that they are able to rate a wine on the basis of one or two sips despite the fact that a fine Bordeaux reveals all its secrets only reluctantly. Moreover, instead of admitting that their guild is widely superfluous today, many critics try to persuade their audience of an assumed hierarchy of Top Bordeaux, a hierarchy which is just as ridiculous and outdated as the whole holy Bordeaux classification system.
That’s a great post. Moreover, it applies more broadly than Bordeaux. Sip, spit, hurry up and post a note. No idea what the wine will be like in an hour or so.
I don’t want to get into who is a lemming or not, but I don’t think sharing taste or having an affinity with someone makes people lemmings or lemming-like. Moving en masse to buy a wine only because it received 94 points from someone that morning, that’s kind of lemming-like. Particularly if one is buying it untasted. Happens a lot, which is why it’s a shame that those points may be based only on a sip and spit taste.
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You miss only one key point in that analysis, Greg, which is how lemmings get to be lemmings. They are so insecure that they jump at the big point wines for the bragging rights, train their palates to like the wines and accept them as the best because The Critics said so, and then reject the wines that The Critics come up short on, often without even tasting them. That is the well-documented history of one particular lemming on this thread. Focus on a tiny handful of wines beloved of Parker to the exclusion of thousands of other, often better wines, thus rendering his judgments about fine wine totally irrelevant…the absurdity of presuming to judge the size and nature of a vast forest by studying a bunch of towering fruit and new oak trees in a tiny part of the forest, and then only a few other assorted trees from the rest…
Most shocking statement in this thread: Gilman feels Pontet Canet is traditional.
As long as the right bank keeps making wines like '98 la grave a pomerol then I will be heaven…and I recently popped two bottles of their '09…oops so long to that style 
…
Michel Rolland and his ilk – aided and abetted by Parker and his minions-- have been a disaster for high/higher end Bordeaux. Yes, inexpensive bordeaux may have never been better then today, but the homogenization and deprecation of some of Bordeaux’s great estates is tragic. Wines like Lascombes are the poster child for where it all went too far.
I can only hope that the pendulum has indeed begun to swing back.
Jeff, you are being incredibly naive if you think that the market is made up of people who really know wine. Points are what gives them security, as the stores are scary places where there are a lot of bottles and they don’t spend the time to research what they are drinking. It’s a lot easier for others to do the tastings, the stores to put the scores on cards and then the consumer knows he/she has not screwed up. Wine buying for the majority of people is a defensive sport. Hence the comment about the lemming mentality. I help out a friend in a store occasionally, and have seen the power of shelf talkers, and Parker/WS aps. And then there are the point whores. My friend’s phone has not stopped ringing since the WS top 100 came out.
And finally there is a small part of the market that really understand what they are drinking, and some agree with me and some with you. We will not agree on the style of wines we like, but at least you have arrived at your conclusions legitimately, even if you continue to get it wrong. Using the market to support your argument is patently ridiculous, because I guarantee that unless people are buying a trusted brand, they are unlikely to have tasted what they buy, and thus need your “experts” to validate their buying decisions.
+1000
A wonderful, wonderful post, Rudi.
Thanks for taking the time to put this down on “paper”.
I believe it’s still there we just have to work a hell of a lot harder to find it
It’s funny, MarcF, perhaps I’m a glass half-full kinda guy, but I remain upbeat about Bordeaux, even if I am down on St. Em… Bdx produces so much wine, so much quality stuff. I bought a fair amount of "09s and '10s from estate that I really enjoy, and even uncovered a few new gems. BTW, what was the estate we bought at Double Helix in Vegas? That was some funky traditional Medoc!
I love so called traditional Bordeaux and I love so called Modern Bordeaux. If that makes me ignorant or a lemming, I’m fine with that. Bordeaux isn’t going anywhere and in my opinion, it’s only getting better.
I tend to be optimistic about things in general, but not Bordeaux.
Quite frankly, it is becoming progressively more difficult to find wines that I like: wines with a certain litheness and a slight austerity. Across the board, the volume has been turned up. This I find to be true even in wines that get a lot of love from AFWE’s. Gilman calls Calon-Segur a traditionally made wine. I had the '09 side-by-side with the '82 two nights ago, and the difference was quite remarkable. Even allowing for age differences, the '09 was steroidal and roly-poly in a way that the '82 never was early on.
I can’t really complain… this is capitalism at its finest, and lots of folks really seem to love the newer style of Bordeaux. Good for them.
‘+ 1000’ ![[wow.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/7/7d450e9830889c8943b674446a21b7254cad657e.gif "wow"){kind=small}
Thanks for the compliment, Bruce! I have spoken from my heart, and I think I have just said what many others feel.
As for the future of Bordeaux I’m as pessimistic as you. Lemmings or not lemmings, a lot of people love modern Bordeaux. Therefore I do not see any motivation for the winemakers to change their direction.
BTW, your ‘+1000’ gives me the idea to use the 1000 point wine rating system for the irresistible, classically styled 2000 Yon-Figeac we had last night. Clearly 923 points.
One of the more annoying things about the traditional/modern debate everywhere is that Parker has, for some time, railed against a straw man, rather than the types of wines that are being discussed here. He rants irrationally against green, vegetal, high-acid, underripe, blah, blah, blah, but rarely names names and provides specifics. His reviews now are political and intellectually dishonest, hellbent as they are upon proving that he is right and has always been right, powerful objective evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
It is for this reason that his followers can be termed lemmings. In essence, he describes over and over a mythical wine, say a Chinon so terrible that Alice Feiring would pour it out, rather than addressing the merits (or lack thereof, in his view) of traditionally made wines that are not possessed of all of those “dreadful shortcomings”, and never have been. No traditionalist drinks thin, green, vegetal, high-acid, underripe wines. Nobody does. Nobody likes them. I fail to see how anyone can deny the impact of Parker, Rolland and others, and also fail to see that, across the spectrum of fine wines, his palate is completely jaded and shot, so that he can only taste huge fruit and huge oak. He is held out as the world’s greatest authority on Bordeaux, but his drink of choice is fruity, oaky recent-vintage Chateauneuf-du-Pape, a journeyman region made famous by Parker where the producers capable of making any claim to greatness can be counted on one hand. What do Parkerites make of the fact that Parker has been tone deaf from day one to most of the greatest traditionally made wines of our time, and that the producers of those wines have thrived in the total absence of Parker’s influence?
Really disheartening to see some long-time traditional Bordeaux drinkers coming so close to throwing in the towel. However, I suspect that the pendulum could well swing the other way as Bordeaux pricing and the emerging preferences of a new generation of wine drinkers continue to fuel the move away from Bordeaux. It is helpful that many newbies and younger buyers around here are keen on understanding the finest traditional producers in Burgundy, the Piemonte, elsewhere in Italy and France, and other regions where Parker and his ilk have had no lasting influence…
D’Issan is still a fantastic wine and remains one of my all-time favourites, Larry. The style of this quintessential Margaux has not changed dramatically. Over the years, their wines have put on weight and body without any loss of elegance, finesse, and delicacy. The spectacular 2006 D’Issan, 12,5 % alcohol, for example, can easily challenge the finest wines of the region.
2003 Rolland de by…fantastic