Winter is a lovely time for drinking wine, and let’s be clear, drinking is not the same as tasting. We’ve had guests in the mountains, where we opened big hearty red wines from Spain to have with roasts, and other friends with whom we compared fendants from Valais over raclette (cheese melted over potatoes) next to a roaring fire. We’ve sipped elegant and classic Salquenen Pinot Noirs with roast chicken, on our own, and drunk exciting Pinot Noirs from Vaud with spicier foods. I don’t remember if we had guests or not, it was that good.
Now I’m back to tasting and visiting vineyards. As a result, you’ll be seeing more of me here again. Swirl, smell, sip, chew (okay, only some of the time) and spit it out. Over and over, for numerous wines. It’s a different sport from drinking.
The wine season is upon us, with 2008 wines being bottled: winemakers are asking for the world’s opinions. Most of the time I write in “Among the Vines” about Swiss wines because I think it’s the world’s loss that they are too little known.
This time, however, it’s Bordeaux in my glass. At the end of the first week in April I went to Saint Emilion to write an article for a US travel magazine called France Today, about the annual circus that surrounds the Bordeaux primeurs – the tastings and price negotiations that surround the newly bottled Bordeaux wines that won’t be sold to most people for at least another couple years.
I drink Bordeaux, and was once even told that if only I would agree to marry a man on the spot he would take me to the best restaurant in Paris and buy me a fine old bottle of one of the best Bordeaux wines (remarkably, I turned him down). But I had never tasted the primeurs, or new wines which are still in their barrels.
I decided to concentrate on Saint Emilion, the little cousin to giant Médoc. The latter was bound to be too busy because that’s where the bulk of the 1,000 or so journalists plus négotiants, or brokers, spend the primeurs week. I thought it would be easier, in a production area that is relatively cozy and manageable, to see how serious wine journalists handle the daunting task of writing notes on hundreds of new wines. I wanted to listen in when the brokers, merchants and producers talked prices. Bordeaux sells €3.4 billion of wine a year, more than a third of that for export, and it accounts for 2.3 percent of the world’s wine production. In wine drinker numbers, Bordeaux produces 258 million bottles of still wine a year.
By comparison, the entire Swiss wine production is about one-tenth of what Bordeaux produces.
Médoc is big vineyards with big names. Saint Emilion has a few big names, such as Chateau Angelus, but it is a patchwork of much smaller vineyards, each with a chateau in the centre of the vines. From any vantage point on this mostly flat land you can see dozens of these family-size operations.
Just as in the larger production areas, the problem is to know where to begin. I started at my host’s, at Chateau Corbin. The owner, young Annabelle Bardinet Cruse, is a very serious and reputable producer who is working hard to bring her grandmother’s vineyards and old home back to their former glory, after some years of semi-neglect. The Cruse in her name comes from her father, a producer in Médoc who comes from one of the first Bordeaux brokers. Some of the merchants in the family remained in the business and theirs is a well-known name; others gradually turned to winemaking. She has the genes, the university training, the skills and the passion plus the good terroir to make her drream happen.
The wine I had at Annabelle’s was smooth and elegant and everything you expect from a Saint Emilion, shared over good conversation with meat roasting over the open fireplace and candelabras casting beautiful long flickering shadows. This is Bordeaux as it is meant to be drunk.
The next morning I set off in a chilly fog for nearby Chateau Angelus, where a few dozen wines could be sampled. These were wines from the owner’s own chateau, the famous Angelus, as well as several others where he is a consultant. British wine writer Jancis Robinson recently complained that there are fewer and fewer blind tastings during this week, that the chateaux want to pull you in to sample only their goods, clearly labeled. I, for one, didn’t mind that.
At 10:00 in the morning a Saint Emilion that was harvested in October 2008, then left in wine barrels for six months, is rough stuff if you are thinking in drinking terms. Elegant but rough, with tannins so chewy in some cases that you could starch your collar in them. The wines will quietly continue to mature after this, and lucky is the drinker who gets to wait for them.
In my case it took a good 15 wines for me to start truly differentiating and appreciating the finer points of these young wines, not yet ready for bottling. I started to trail along behind a group from Singapore, for Asian buyers were very much in evidence, and these people were serious tasters. I began to pay closer attention, limited myself to red wines, learned to appreciate the differences in these tannins so typical of young wines. I quickly realized that a couple of these were wines I knew I would learn to love in the near future, after their quiet spell in the cellar. You’ll have to read the magazine article to find out which ones.
The French merchants who sell to the world are describing the 2008 vintage as classic, with good colour, promising structure and silky, well-balanced tannins, good complexity.
Jancis Robinson, who with her sidekick Julia wrote notes on 550 wines, says “in St-Émilion, the large region on the right bank of the Gironde which has produced more than its fair share of exaggerated wine styles in recent years (even in a recent blind tasting of 200 top wines from the celebrated 2005 vintage), the 2008s seemed in general attractively succulent, energetic, concentrated and only rarely over-extracted.”
I only sampled 100 or so wines, but I’m inclined to think she’s right. I’m still chewing on the notion of over-extracted.