Unrequited Love

kevin heatherington said:
Bordeaux is an interesting one. Rarely sublime, predictable, even boring at times, but, with age, it is the epitome of balance and red fruit, cedar and tobacco charm. A great food wine.

But the problem is the price. In the days when one could get minor classed growths and top Cru Bourgeois for under £30 it was the perfect Sunday lunch wine. But no way am I going to fork out £75+ a bottle, cellar it for 10-15 years and then drink it with my Sunday roast. At that price I want a whole lot more and know I’m not going to get it.
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I agree, I'm lucky to have enough of the older stuff (which I can no longer afford) to see me through.

Though I get quite a bit of pleasure from cheaper, younger Haut Medocs and St Estephes, in a cold beef/steak and chips sort of way. I've learned to be fairly selective on these though, for instance I bought a case of Ch Beaumont, which others here seem to like, and I have to say I'm not feeling the love at all....
 
Beaumont takes time. I remember a case of the ‘95 being ghastly at 10 years old but a nice old wine at 20.

ditto glad to have plenty of maturing Bordeaux in store bought when prices were a bit more sensible. But Beaumont and Senejac are about as expensive as I go on new vintages these days.

Petit chateau remain an option for Sunday lunch, of course, and at that price point so do New World Bordeaux blends. But these are filler wines really.
 
kevin heatherington said:
Bordeaux is an interesting one. Rarely sublime, predictable, even boring at times, but, with age, it is the epitome of balance and red fruit, cedar and tobacco charm. A great food wine.

But the problem is the price. In the days when one could get minor classed growths and top Cru Bourgeois for under £30 it was the perfect Sunday lunch wine. But no way am I going to fork out £75+ a bottle, cellar it for 10-15 years and then drink it with my Sunday roast. At that price I want a whole lot more and know I’m not going to get it.
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Not quite sure what you mean Kevin. Which Cru Bourgeois are you referring to? You can get Poujeaux, Chasse Spleen, and even Cantermerle for £30 all in for their 2016s. That is stonkingly good value. Yes you might need to wait (though to be honest they are pretty delicious now after a few hours decant) but I don't see how you could spend £75 quid on one unless you mean in magnum ;)
 
Well, Cantemerle has always been the cheapest cru, and one swallow doesn’t make a summer.
If I look back at what I was buying and not paying more than 360 for a full 12 bottle case it looks like this (being pushed relentlessly down market)

2000: Rausan Segla, Pontet Canet, Haut Bailey
2005 Talbot, Haut Bergey, Gloria
2010 none, only 6 packs of Batailley, Haut Bages liberal, chasse spleen
2015 Only 6 packs of cantemerle, d’Angludet, Gironville.

After that I stopped buying it.
 
Most Rioja. I can't get very far past stewed fruit and vanilla sensation from excessive oak treatment . Would just rather have a high altitude Grenache instead.
 
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Oh good call, Graeme - I get a shudder when I just think about drinking Rioja because I get that expectation of tomato and excessive oak and vanilla!!!

Sometimes when I do open one I think "oh, this is much better than i expected"

However, it is the expectation of vanilla and oak that keep me away.
 
kevin heatherington said:
Well, Cantemerle has always been the cheapest cru, and one swallow doesn’t make a summer.
If I look back at what I was buying and not paying more than 360 for a full 12 bottle case it looks like this (being pushed relentlessly down market)

2000: Rausan Segla, Pontet Canet, Haut Bailey
2005 Talbot, Haut Bergey, Gloria
2010 none, only 6 packs of Batailley, Haut Bages liberal, chasse spleen
2015 Only 6 packs of cantemerle, d’Angludet, Gironville.

After that I stopped buying it.
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Ah ok you mean classed growths. Yes they are certainly not the value they used to be. :(
 
Paul J a i n e s said:
I've moved waaaaay down the foodchain on Bordeaux and find myself having so much more pleasure...
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I do think that the relentless increase in pricing of top Bordeaux has been partially compensated by a steady improvement in quality amongst properties excluded from the laughably obsolete 1855 Classification, so that 'lesser' classed growths and crus bourgeois are now making wines far superior than their official status would suggest. Every year one reads about more famous names opting to present their wine only by appointment at the château – while we quietly depend on our critical sources being unswayed by liveried flunkeys and monogrammed Riedels, the cynic in me has long wondered if producers are not equally nervous about whose sample may be showing rather better at one fortieth of the price on the next table at a Union des Grands Crus tasting – especially if several hundred pesky merchants or (heaven forbid) actual drinkers of wine pick up on the discrepancy... :rolleyes:

Admittedly I'm still curating a modest handful of second growths from 1996 to 2016 gathering dust in someone else's warehouse, which (even allowing for recent readjustments) have 'done well' over the years – I forget how I paid less than £15 per bottle for 2004 Léoville-Barton, but some questions are better left unasked. However any genuine satisfaction from those wines will only manifest itself at sale into a trophy market still bizarrely dependent on primeur tasting notes (as if more topical experience might dilute the adrenaline of Parker's initial headrush), because I can't readily justify pulling cases out of bond just to crack a bottle – they have become sterile commodities and I must confess no real love for them...

kevin heatherington said:
But the problem is the price. In the days when one could get minor classed growths and top Cru Bourgeois for under £30 it was the perfect Sunday lunch wine. But no way am I going to fork out £75+ a bottle, cellar it for 10-15 years and then drink it with my Sunday roast. At that price I want a whole lot more and know I’m not going to get it.
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Obviously it depends on your expectations and requirements, but I would still politely question this. In the last few years I have stealthily accumulated cases of what I consider fine drinking claret (the likes of Bellegrave, Cambon la Pelouse, Charmail, Coutelin-Merville, Fourcas-Hosten, Moulin Rouge, Rahoul and Sociando-Mallet) from top vintages (I particularly admire the consistency of 2010 and 2016) without ever spending more than £20 per bottle delivered – the performance of bottles tasted so far implies that those wines may come very close to matching (and quite possibly even surpass) my scattered recollections of drinking older third and fourth growths, with the added satisfaction of knowing that my 'humble' bottles cost me far less... :)
 
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With Claret I used to try to appreciate it but largely failed. Whereas, Rioja I used to think I didn't like but now i'm quite into it. Sort of the opposite really.
 
Ben Coffman said:
Like Adam, I have a had a few Mas de Daumas Gassac and only one ever lived up to its reputation: the 1990. Ogther that did not were 1998s, a 1991, a 1996 and a IIRC a 2001 were all meh, but all a bit rustic and charmless.

I'm with Chris too on white CndP. I'm not sure I have ever had a great Semillon either, but I've not had that many. I have a couple of mature Tyrell's waiting to change my mind.
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I took the 1990 Mas de Daumas Gassac to the first ever offline I attended, at The Establishment in Manchester (was that actually the first ever Manchester offline?). I guess it must have been around 15 years ago. Ray Abercrombie was leading the tasting, which was conducted blind. Ray's take on the wine (before the reveal) was that it might have been a Cru Classe St Julien - not one of the upper tier ones but around 4th Growth level.

Anyway, we drank the 1998 on Sunday night with a cassoulet and I have to say I thought it rather good. It was in the style of a classical claret (i.e. the sort that I like), still with a bit of fruit, fully resolved and nicely balanced, palate-cleansing, dry-ish finish. I think it might have been the best I've had apart from the 1990.

Like Ben, I've found most other vintages a bit "meh", and sometimes charmless although not necessarily rustic.
 
<deep breath>

White Burgundy made this century. Pointless, reduced, over-alcoholic popcorn-drenched Emperor's New Clothes. The more expensive the wine the worse the ENC syndrome is.

If you go and drink something like an '85 Chassagne, a '91 Meusault-Perrieres from Ampeau, a '93 Carillon 1er Puligny then you have a sense of what the wine is about. Nothing, repeat nothing I have drunk made in the last 20 years gets anywhere near. The absurd pricing just adds gratuitous insult to grievous injury.

I think the worst one was '09 Leflaive Clavoillons. And no one round the table calls it out because of the heritage and the cost.

I used to enjoy a couple of cases a year of BB from a good grower, but now that that is £30 on the table - no thank you.
 
Joel Hopwood said:
<deep breath>

White Burgundy made this century. Pointless, reduced, over-alcoholic popcorn-drenched Emperor's New Clothes. The more expensive the wine the worse the ENC syndrome is.

If you go and drink something like an '85 Chassagne, a '91 Meusault-Perrieres from Ampeau, a '93 Carillon 1er Puligny then you have a sense of what the wine is about. Nothing, repeat nothing I have drunk made in the last 20 years gets anywhere near. The absurd pricing just adds gratuitous insult to grievous injury.

I think the worst one was '09 Leflaive Clavoillons. And no one round the table calls it out because of the heritage and the cost.

I used to enjoy a couple of cases a year of BB from a good grower, but now that that is £30 on the table - no thank you.
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Joel, find someone who has some bottles by Arnaud Enté, and ask them to help you confirm or correct this viewpoint.
 
I own a lot of Ente. Is it expensive ? Yes. Luckily I don’t pay the secondary prices.
but there is a world beyond this. Lots of examples of good value white burgundy out there
especially at BB level. It’s not a lost cause.
 
Joel makes a very fair point, a huge amount of modern white burgundy is as feeble and tedious as it is overpriced, but so does Ray: I doubt there has ever been better white burgundy than what Ente is making. I don't think the Ente style, or for that matter the Coche-Dury pére style from which it arguably evolved, are in any way 'a l'ancienne' however, it being very much a contemporary evolution evidently impossible to duplicate or everyone would be doing it. In my imagination the very few Leroy and D'Auvenay bottles I have had the fortune to sample are much more in the historical line but I can't really prove it; otherwise the old style seems be extinct, I have several times mused that the recipe has genuinely been lost.
I'd be very happy to find a BB of the quality that Jobard and Leflaive used to offer but those I've had in recent years, even quite grand ones from Coche and Roulot, fail miserably to float my boat.
 
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