Best evah!

[chickenfeet]

I have just received my first futures(1) offer for the 2005 clarets. For the 20th year running the 2005's are "possibly the best vintage ever"(2). Now, one of the (few) advantages of creeping senility to the wine drinker is not, as one might suspect, having had the opportunity to sample fine wines at various ages and thus to form one's own views on how much time in the cellar makes sense. Rather it is the deep skepticism produced by decades of hype from growers, negociants, merchants and puffsters(3) that greets every vintage. It's the only constant apart from the inevitable price hike.

Now, I'm old enough to remember 1972 which as possibly one other person on LJ will recall broke through all previous records for opening prices amid hype that was excessive even by Gascon standards. I also recall that by five years or so after the wines first went on sale the auction houses were full of them as merchants tried to offload wines whose meager fruit would never balance truly world class levels of acid and tannin.(4) I speak with authority as the wine buyer at my club bought a bunch of classed growths at knock down prices and I can remember a couple of evenings when he, the club assistant manager and a couple of my colleagues managed to 'sample' half a dozen bottles after dinner just to be sure. Now, not every year has been as big a bust as '72 but the number that have 'underachieved' is not inconsiderable.

I can't say it's always wrong to buy futures. It's one of the few (relatively) affordable ways of sustaining a claret habit but one does have to be damn careful. It's especially tough here where one is effectively restricted to buying through the government monopoly but even in England there are only a couple of wine merchants that I would actually trust. I'm slowly allowing experience to triumph over hope and largely refusing to buy wines for laying down unless I can taste them first. That's not possible for me for claret so I am taking Hugh Johnson's advice from his classic book on the wines of Bordeaux and concentrating on patronising two or three local petit fournisseurs whose skills I admire, who will let me taste and who will share their expertise with a valued repeat customer. Besides it's more fun.

Notes:
(1) For some reason the English render 'futures' as en primeur. The French probably have some apposite phrase in Swahili.
(2) There are variants of which "vintage of the century" is the most egregious.
(3) They call themselves journalists but they are so beholden to the industry for freebies that they daren't rock the boat ever.
(4) While I think that Robert Parker's California besotted palate should be consigned to the outer darkness, man cannot live by tannin alone.

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

We call them "primeurs". 72 was a fairly bad year, but I always found that good wines in bad years are always better than so-so wines even in good years. Case in point, friends once offered me a bottle of 1977 Mouton Rothschild. 1977 has such a bad reputation it doesn't even appear on those little vintage calendars that go 1976, 1978. My boyfriend in the early 90s was a bit (a bit? a huge mega whammy) of a wine snob. "Ils se sont foutus de ta gueule," he sniffed when I showed him the bottle. I took it back, and drank it with someone else. Nectar all the way, subtle, smoky, tannic, just plain wonderful.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

72 was a fairly bad year,

Indeed, but the opening offers were something like 30% higher than the very good '70s and '71s. I would say that '72 was a very bad year. Comparable with '74 and far worse than '77 or '73. The Giscours '77 was very decent. I enjoyed a bottle with a take out curry after the FA Cup final in '84.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Giscours is good more or less any time. (Come to think of it I have some 85 it's about time to drink...)

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

And I'm not so sure about the "good property, bad year" thing. It may be something to do with the market here but a first growth in a poor year would likely sell for about 2/3 the price of a good year, whereas a third growth would be much less than half the price of a first from the same year. Given a choice between, say, a bottle of Mouton '84 and a bottle of Leoville-Barton '83 at half the price, I'd buy the Leoville.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

That woukld depend on the actual price, but yes, silly stickers will turn me off grand bottles. What annoys me these days are second wines sold for practically the price of the first a couple of years ago. I mean, a 2001 Forts de Latour is NOT worth $200 a pop.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I mean, a 2001 Forts de Latour is NOT worth $200 a pop.

Good grief! I paid C$58 for Bahans de Haut Brion '98 and I think that's on the high side.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Oh, and Robert Parker really likes alcoholic fruit juice, not real wine.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Oh, and a lot of the 75s are barely mature NOW.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

A bit like some of us '57s. To be fair I think '75 is one of those vintages where, although some wines eventually showed well, a lot went from immature to senile with very little pause.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on the "very little pause", but when you managed to catch it, it could be glorious. About ten years ago I had dinner at the Quai Voltaire & we had 75 Domaine de Chevalier, and even though it was decanted, the first glass wasn't especially interesting. And THEN it suddenly opened, and it was a thing of wonder.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

[I was writing a comment on this when everything crashed... Let's see what I can remember!]

I have used en primeur offerings from the Wine Society to build up a virtual cellar (virtual because it is all sitting waiting for me in Stevenage, four hundered miles away). I read the Society's blurb for the first release of 2005, and it struck me as being very hopeful - it bascially said "buy as much of the stuff as you can".

I'll probably buy a couple of mixed cases - just to keep the pipeline going; but petit chateau - £12-£15 mark; the prices on more well-known producers are just scary (and I don't know that I would appreciate the difference; whenever I have been at tastings, I find the more expensive wines disappointing: they raise high expectations, and often don't deliver).

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

The Wine Society is one of "the couple of wine merchants" that I might be inclined to trust (and the cellarage is handy).

The cru classé vs petit chateau issue is a difficult one. The top wines are overpriced for sure but they are the only ones that are sufficiently characteristic to make me want to buy them. The wine that you can buy for ₤12 would likely cost me over $30 and at that price point I can buy lots of stuff that I would rather have than petit chateau claret.