Weekly Tasting Report (Apr 5-11, 2021): En primeur tastings start, plus 100 points in Napa
En primeur tastings started last week in Hong Kong, and initial impressions are of an excellent vintage.
Bordeaux 2020 barrel samples are the majority of wines in this week’s report and will be a continued feature for the next month or so as I review about 800 to 1,000 samples from France’s most popular wine region. But there’s also a perfect-rated Napa Valley mountain cabernet sauvignon from the fantastic 2018 as well as a number of 2017 Barolos, including one from the legendary Bruno Giacosa, and dozens of Chilean wines for our upcoming report, not to mention many other wines from various countries and regions. There’s even a vertical tasting of every bottled vintage of Tuscany’s Bibi Graetz Colore, now a blend of mostly sangiovese with canaiolo and colorino, from 2000 to 2018. They were tasted during a global Zoom tasting with participants in Hong Kong, Seoul, Zurich, Bordeaux and Florence.
This is the second year that I have tasted barrel samples from Bordeaux (called ‘en primeur’ in French), in Hong Kong due to the COVID pandemic instead of being in France. All the samples are air-freighted to Hong Kong in a few days direct from the wineries. So far, I have scored almost 200 wines for this report and I can already say that the 2020 vintage is an excellent one and compares favorably to 2019 and 2018. Keep in mind that they are unfinished wines and only an example of the potential quality of what will finally be bottled late next year. This is why I use a two-point spread in my ratings.
In general, the 2020 Bordeaux reds show plenty of fruit, but not too much, and the tannins are ripe and polished giving excellent length to the wines. I find the wines, so far, to be slightly less flamboyant than the 2018s and more along the lines of the 2019s that had fantastic freshness and linear phenolic character. Most of the samples I rated this week came from the laboratory of consulting enologist Michel Rolland. I did a quick Zoom call with him and a few other wineries.
How good is Bordeaux’s 2020 vintage? James and Michel Rolland discuss.
James discusses frost and the 2020s with Croix de Labrie’s Pierre Courdurie.
“We have a reputation in Bordeaux to say the last vintage is the best one,” Rolland said by Zoom from his laboratory in Pomerol. “But we did 2018, 2019 and now 2020 … after we did our tastings in the Spring I can say it is a really great vintage. It is different than 2019 with more freshness, more tension, more balance. It’s a good one. May be a bit less powerful than 2019 but it made really great wine. I think that we can call it a trilogy now [three consecutive high quality vintages: 2018, 2019 and 2020].”
He said it will be up to all of us to decide which one of the three new vintages is the best. “But you have to say that it [2020] is a very, very good vintage,” he added.
We already know that the 2018 vintage is a winner in Napa Valley and I tasted a handful of wines from Dana Estates, one of the cult wine producers of the region. I found the wines to be some of the best I have rated so far from 2018. And the two single-vineyard wines, Helms Vineyard and Lotus Vineyard, showed incredible depth and intensity with fantastically strong yet polished, fine tannins that gave the wine form and beauty. They didn’t produce a wine from Hershey Vineyard in 2018 due to some concerns of smoke from fires north of Napa that had settled in their highest vineyards in Howell Mountain.
“It was a vintage with this combination of almost perfect heat and still being a cooler vintage and the wines expressed that,” said Chris Cooney, head winemaker of Dana. “They are wines that have a little more energy and those secondary notes that you don’t see for cabernet sauvignons. They had left layers to the wines … my favorite part about the wines are that they have such bright acidity … they are a touch more approachable than 2016 and 2017.”
James tastes Dana’s excellent 2018 wines with winemaker Chris Cooney.
His colleague Jae Chun, who was in his car for the Zoom call, called it a “James Suckling vintage compared to other critics,” pointing out that the wines have much more balance than past vintages and freshness – wines that I really like, as you know.
Cooney added about his perfect wine: “What’s incredible about the Lotus is it brings all this power and density but it maintains a freshness and balance.”
Freshness was also a theme in tasting 2017 Barolos. As I have written in the past, I was concerned that the vintage could end up overly concentrated and fruity like other vintages that saw hot and dry grape-growing conditions during the summer. But the year has produced nebbiolo-based reds with form and tension despite plenty of fruit. The Bruno Giacosa Falletto Barolo Falletto 2017 rated in this report was a good example of this when I used the word “powerful” to describe its structure.
Several of the Italian wines in the report were Bibi Graetz’s Colore, a principally sangiovese-based red with colorino and caniolo. The vertical of all the wines made to date (you can sort the wines below by producer to find them more easily, or use the search function) showed the history and evolution of Graetz’s winemaking in Tuscany. And I felt his current wines had the most precision and focus compared to those at the beginning.
We also rated dozens of Chilean wines for our coming report with many outstanding quality and well-priced whites. Chardonnay continues to shine in Chile with so many 90-plus wines from $15 to $25 a bottle. And the country has four excellent vintages in a row with 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. We are still finalizing our ideas about 2020 but we were there for the harvest last year and the grapes looked excellent in most areas.
Check out all the wines rated below. It’s another week for discovery in Planet wine.
– James Suckling, editor
The list of wines below are bottles tasted and rated in the previous week by James and other tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many latest releases not yet in the market, but entering soon. Some will be included in upcoming tasting reports.
Note: You can sort the wines below by country, vintage, score, and alphabetically by winery name, and can search for specific wines in the search bar.
A wine tasting where the youngest wine is a 1945? Surely the recent vertical tasting of dessert wines from Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey in Sauternes/Bordeaux at the Château finished with the famous 1945 vintage, the oldest wine of the evening.
But no. That was the last of the 28 wines tasted, and the youngest of them. The tasting began with the 1906 vintage, the oldest wine shown.
Why invite an international group of journalists, top somms and collectors and do such a crazy tasting? The answer is that Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey’s Swiss owner Silvio Denz (who also owns the famous Lalique crystal company and a handful of Bordeaux châteaux including Péby Faugères and Faugères in St. Emilion) was anxious to demonstrate the enormous aging potential of Sauternes.
Sauternes is probably the most misunderstood of France’s classic wines and it has also struggled due to the unfashionable status of dessert wines in many markets. This combination plus a lack of determination on the part of some châteaux owners during recent decades led the appellation into crisis.
Vineyard prices are a good indicator of this situation. The average price of one hectare (just shy of 2.5 acres) of vineyards in Sauternes is 30,000 euros (US$34,300), whereas the cost of one hectare in Pauillac/Médoc averages euro2 million and one hectare in Pomerol around euro1.5 million.
Denz is determined not only to bring Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey back to the top, but also to lift the image of the Sauternes appellation.
So how does a 1906 Sauternes from one of the top properties of the appellation taste? Not nearly as old as you would imagine. The crème brulée and dried apricot aromas give it plenty of appeal and the herbal freshness plus a hint of tannin balance these nicely.
“It’s really amazing for a wine that’s more than 100 years old,” said Romain Ittis, the head sommelier of Restaurant Villa Lalique in Wingen-sur-Moder in Alsace/France. “1906 was not a great vintage and is totally forgotten. You can say the same about many of the other wines in the tasting!”
Indeed. The forgotten 1909 impressed us even more than the famous 1911, the former wine rating 95 and the latter 94. Both the 1923 and 1926 showed extremely well with great richness and depth of character, both rating 95 and holding their own next to the sublime 1929 that rated a perfect 100 points. The 1930s were a difficult period for Sauternes due to the Great Depression, but the 1938 earned 93 points and didn’t taste out of place next to the famous 1937 and 1945 that I rated 98 points each.
Of the 28 wines shown, only one – the slightly edgy 1918 – failed to rate 90+, and one other, the 1939, was withdrawn due to cork taint. Considering the youngest wine in the tasting was 73 years old that’s an amazing result and this is down to the performance of the wines from the “lesser” vintages. Clearly, Sauternes from lesser vintages can age far longer than generally supposed if the vineyards are well tended, harvest of nobly-rotten grapes is well-selected, and winemaking is precise.
That will surely be the case with the stunning wines of recent vintages from Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey. We loved the exotic fruit coulis character and electric acidity of the 2015, rating it 97 points and including it in our list of the best 100 French wines tasted in 2018. The 2015 was a great vintage for Sauternes and it’s well known that such wines have great aging potential. Even the Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey 2014 – not a special vintage for Sauternes – that we rated 93 points has a great future ahead of it.
The dinner that accompanied the tasting in the restaurant of the Relais & Châteaux Hotel in the château also demonstrated that mature Sauternes is a more flexible food wine than it is normally. Pan-roasted foie gras – a savory dish – is an ideal partner. Their other advantage is the modest prices at auction compared with top Bordeaux reds of the same age. — Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor
Click ahead to read a profile on Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey.