Château Bellevue: Tasting & Drinking
Considering Château Bellevue’s recent history, and the famous names then have been associated with the estate during the course of the last two decades, it may seem surprising that this estate was one of the many casualties of the St Emilion 2006 classification fiasco. This ill-fated review of the ranking system, which was followed by years of legal wrangling, was based on the tasting of ten vintages, starting with 1993 and ending with 2002. Most of the good work in recent years at this estate concerned ineligible vintages, and the estate was demoted based essentially on the wines of the pre-Thienpont and pre-Derenoncourt era. With the collapse of this new ranking, which had nothing to do with Château Bellevue but was the result of legal action brought by other demoted proprietors, this change was reversed, and the property held onto its ranking of grand cru classé. As I have already espoused in my profile, this decision was upheld when the classification was revisited in 2012.
My own opinion of the wines can sadly not make any comparison between the wines of the current era and the last one; my tasting experience only takes in very recent vintages. The wines are indeed good, but looking back a decade or two I would frequently find that they followed the tendency in St Emilion at that time to focus on extraction, with the 2005 vintage a particular culprit. Other critics have raved about the wine, but taste is personal; for young Bordeaux to have any potential it must have a good tannic structure, but when the tannins dominate in the way that they did I had to question the balance of the wine. Perhaps if I were to come back to it after two decades in the bottle, though, I might feel different?
Having said that some vintages, particularly more recent years, have certainly held my attention over the years. I have always thought the 2003 vintage a very good effort for the year, and while it shows the soft acidity, roasted fruit and full, plump, presumptuous style of the vintage, I know from experience that what was achieved here was a lot better than the results at many other domaines. And the wine held up well, long past its tenth birthday, a feature far from universal in this vintage.
