WineChapUK recently returned from a bourgeois trip to Bordeaux wherein they had a chance to collect crucial intel on all of the hysteria surrounding the 2009 vintage. One thing is for sure, prices are set to return to outer space and all of the chatter surrounding the vintage will nearly shatter sound barrier. Here’s WineChap’s brief impression:
“As wine writers the world over sharpen their pencils and prime their TweetDecks, and before the pending barrage of opinion and counter-opinion from the 8,000+ tasters who descended on Bordeaux last week subsumes us: 2009 IS an astonishing vintage and it was a privilege, if not always a pleasure, to taste. As WineChap’s host from Maison Sichel said of the wines in comparison to 2005, to which early comparisons were being made (perhaps rashly) ‘some were better, some worse, some sensational.’”
So, that being said, WineChapUK will break it down for us in bite size musings by appellation. First up: St. Estephe.“Two of the first ‘09s tried by WineChap, in succession, were the appellation’s big hitters Cos D’Estournel and Montrose and gave an immediate indication that the vintage could NOT be categorised as simply as ’05, to which it had been earlier compared. Where Montrose was a vibrant, elegant rapier of a wine, Cos was a sledgehammer, opaque and massively extracted, the latter sampled in the Jean-Guillaume’s new winery, a high tech cross between Blofeld’s lair and the Bhuddha Bar.” WineChap’s picks (and two stars of the vintage): Lafon Rochet, Ormes de Pez
