Tone Deaf readers who date back will know my wine education was backwards way round. As a youth I occasionally drank the best wines in the world, courtesy of my father, a claret enthusiast. Wines that would today cost a fortune (eg, Ch. Margaux 2008, £4783 a case). Since then I've had to aim lower, gradually raising my sights as I became wealthier.
I became "comfortably off" but never wealthy. Alas I could still taste my father's clarets. For decades I tolerated this gap, now at 82 I am growing more impatient. Not that I'm contemplating a remortgage to pay for Ch. Margaux, but I'm spending far too much time in the Land of Remembrance of Things Past. Last night, acknowledging the year is 2018, I went under the stairs.
The wine above is a Cahors. Cahors, in central France, is a mere 150 miles from Bordeaux where Ch. Margaux is created; oenologically speaking the distance is more like that to Mars.
Early Cahors is bitter - undrinkable in my view. The serious young man in glasses at the Cahors cave des vignerons warned me but I knew already. Back home the bottle went under the stairs to be forgotten.
Note the date - 2000. Back then I was still ski-ing. I pulled the cork and sniffed: rich, pungent, multi-layered. But bouquets can be treacherous. I didn't decant it, expecting sludge. After 90 minutes I tasted it and it was pretty good, if light-years away from Ch. Margaux. A magnum of that vintage would cost £26 today, a bargain. Back in Cahors it probably cost £5.
There are seven “forgotten” bottles – all different – under the stairs. Two are whites and probably past it. I live in straitened times.
* Cribbed from SJ Perelman.
I too had the "misfortune" to sample those priceless wines from Father. I know they were exceptional, but do you think we may be living on exaggerated memories to some extent?
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: Not I, I can taste them now. Very occasionally - on wedding anniversaries and/or birthdays - I have pushed the boat out and spent a goodly sum in UK or French restaurants (though not yet into three figures) and have retrieved perhaps a one-fifth memory of what we drank at Laurel Cottage. The key to those flavours is a sort of living volatility, as if one were drinking a highly refined form of petrol. A very, very rare experience. The analogy may sound ridiculous but it is the best I can manage.
ReplyDeleteYou'll get a comment from me every time you write "ski-ing".
ReplyDeleteMikeM: Guess what I'll do every time you write color.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how much you would pay in a restaurant for a good premier cru Bordeaux, and how much you would have to pay to buy from a retailer (perhaps it would only be possible by the case for the latter?)
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: Are these good enough for you?
ReplyDeleteRoux at the Landau, The Langham Hotel, London
1990 Ch. Margaux £1410, 1990 Ch. Latour £1730, 1990 Ch. Lafite Rothschild £1950. 1982 Petrus £7500
To my knowledge we have drunk Latour of that relative age at Laurel Cottage.
Oh dear! Even some of the latter day banking yuppies may have flinched at those prices - are they still around? I suppose it's Russian oligarchs now. What about the second part of my query - how much, in comparison from a retailer?
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: I hope you weren't expecting any bargains. These prices were listed at Berry Bros & Rudd, Pall Mall, London, the Queen's off-licence.
ReplyDeleteNo 1990 Ch. Latour. Nearest: 1986 x 12, £5647
No 1990 Ch. Margaux. Nearest: 1996 x 12, £6175
No 1990 Ch. Lafite Rothschild. Nearest 2000 x 1 bottle, £1685
1990 Petrus - only available in bond x 3 bottles £12,000
Why was 1990 a good year for Bordeaux? My quick google search revealed no answer.
ReplyDeleteMikeM: This is an incredibly difficult question. On the other hand it's laughably simple: a continuously hot summer that snaps off suddenly into autumn, say in late September.
ReplyDeleteAlso known in the UK as claret, red Bordeaux (there are also whites) is arguably France's most "serious" wine. Back in the mid 1800s all the then existing chateaux were classified according to quality. Inevitably there've been unofficial attempts to re-classify some of them but, rather amazingly, the original listings still more or less hold. But then history can play a part...
Especially at the top end, the Big Four, known as premier crus: Haut Brion, Latour, Margaux, Lafite. In 1973, after endless lobbying, Ch. Mouton-Rothschild, previously a deuxieme cru, was admitted to the major league although the Big Four didn't become the Big Five: Lafite and MR combined.
One of the talents of the Big Four is that even in years where the weather is foul they manage to produce wine that they consider drinkable, in fact to "declare" a vintage. Whereas other slightly lesser vineyards have been known to sell that year's harvest under the labels of their subsidiary vineyards. How do the Big Four do this? Who knows? Labour-intensive practices, even longer maturation periods and the effects of an indefinable phenomenon known as terroir may be the answer. Even so even the Big Four can't walk on water; some years are definitely inferior and critics will say so. My father said that, nevertheless, an inferior Big Four wine had a lot to say about itself and could be drunk for "instruction".
Why 1990? Because of the grapes used, especially cabernet sauvignon although merlot is becoming more popular, many major Bordeaux wines start out as tannic and take a long long time to mature. Some that started out unpromising may improve with age. Obviously storage for a long maturation adds to the cost. Eventually some younger wines may turn out to be better than older wines. The short answer is I don't know and the fact may be that age isn't even the most important factor. On the other hand certain rare years, because of exact combination of meterological factors, are almost immediately recognised as "great". In Germany I once drank a Jahrhundertswein dating back to 1959, a "wine of the century" no less.
The trick with red wine that is capable of improving with age (most don't) is to ignore these grotesquely priced dinosaurs and to look elsewhere. If you haven't tried Chilean wines, they're a good start.