Interlude – Between Bordeaux and Loire

I was going to go right to the Loire part of our trip, but why not stretch this out as long as possible? I have nothing to do and since you are reading this post, you must not have anything to do either (just kidding. I have heard it is not good policy to insult your readers).

If you are questioning why my Bordeaux post sounds like it has been written by the tourism board of France, there are a couple of reasons for that. The first being that it is never good to write bad things about wineries or people in the wine industry. It is a very closed industry and everybody knows someone you dislike. So you can take my post with a grain of salt if you like, or you can just understand that if I didn’t like something, it probably didn’t end up in the post.

The more important reason why the post sounds so sunshiny is that I had a low expectation of Bordeaux. More and more writers in the US have written off Bordeaux as irrelevant and too expensive. If you listen to these guys, you would think that every wine in the region is 150 € and a rip off. While it is true that the first growth prices are sky high, there are still quite a few wines out there that are great for the price. There are over 2,000 Chateaus in Bordeaux, so somebody has to be producing something that is freaking good for the price, you just have to figure out which Chateaus those are. I had a really nice bottle of 2006 Rauzan-Segla 750ml (3rd growth) the other night for $60. It was an “off” vintage but there was nothing off about it. Another example was the 2005 Boyd-Cantenac 375ml (3rd Growth) that I was able to buy in Bordeaux for 20 €, a classic wine from a classic vintage without a ridiculous price. So take that Wall Street Journal! (newspapers are okay to bag on)

Also, I would say that the 150 € wines that I did taste, the 1996 Chateau Palmer, the 2002 Haut Brion, and the 2004 Angelus were actually worth the price. There was incredible depth, complexity and balance without all of the overblown alcohol or residual sugar of some Napa producers around the same price. These wines truly blew away my expectations.

Before I visited Bordeaux I was missing a key component in my palate, which had I understood it, I believe my expectations would have been higher. Obviously it is colder in Bordeaux than it is in Napa so the fruit is less prevalent. But the missing component revolved around how the “earth” is conveyed in wines of Bordeaux. The earth in some of these well produced bottles tends to be more along the lines of coffee, toffee, tobacco and gravel (with a hint of tar). The Eureka moment when tasting one of these bottles comes when the fruit, oak and earth create a balance that leads to incredible complexity. If you get “earth” in a Napa Cabernet or Sonoma Merlot it leans more towards green characteristics such as leaf, green bean or eucalyptus. Maybe that’s why there is such a push to ripen out the earth in the United States. The wine critics perceive that type of earth as a flaw out of balance and therefore not worthy of 90+ (the silliest rating system ever I might add). That is fine with me because it keeps the price somewhat reasonable on wines that balance the earth, fruit and oak in California. I think the Heitz Trailside or Kamen Cabernet are examples that I can appreciate even more now that I have visited Bordeaux.

In the end, I guess what I’m saying is that it is all about expectations. If you hype a vintage like 1997 for California Cabernet Sauvignon as 98 points, then find out that a majority of the wines didn’t age more than 5 years in the bottle, you are going to be disappointed (I would give that vintage 78 points). However take a vintage like 2002 in Bordeaux that received a mid eighties score from Robert Parker and then buy some of the third, forth and fifth growths for $30-50, taste them and have a great time (definitely 96 points for that vintage). To wrap this up on the same topic, I was told Bordeaux was a 82 points before I went. I went to Bordeaux and thought it was 98 points. So in reality, it is probably somewhere in the middle, say at 91 points to adjust for my expectations. Hopefully now that you have read this post with your low expectations of my writing skills, you will tell your friends it was 100 points so that they come to my website, click on the adds, and then Google will send me a $5 check in 6 months :).