Château La Mission Haut-Brion: Tasting & Drinking
When one is reviewing a château with such an illustrious history – there are not many estates in Bordeaux that can provide such a detailed account of its birth and its life to date – it is tempting to look back over the many centuries of wine production and to also review them, vintage by vintage, bottle by bottle. It is also inevitable that when we have two neighbouring properties with so much in common – the terroir, the proprietor, even the name – that there will be comparisons between the two. This leads to the inevitable question: which do you prefer, Haut-Brion or its La Mission cousin?
My response to such a question is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a straightforward one. This is not a simple binary question, as there are shades of grey here. When reviewing vintage pairs of such closely matched properties, there are bound to be some vintages where one wine prevails, others where it does not. And when reviewing wines, especially older vintages, individual bottles may themselves show marked differences, and naturally individual tasters will hold differing opinions, as I would hope. There is nothing so dull as uniform agreement. With these reservations duly lodged, I must confess that I have realised over the years that my tastes lean slightly more towards the majesty of Château Haut-Brion than they do towards the seductive and perfumed allure of Château La Mission Haut-Brion.
In almost every vintage I find Château Haut-Brion possesses that elusive extra nuance, the most notable exception being 2009, ironically a vintage when so many other tasters placed Château Haut-Brion as a candidate for wine of the vintage. Although I saw its magnificence, a little whisp of tangible alcohol planted a seed of doubt in my mind regarding this matter, and in terms of pure quality I could not differentiate between the two. Alcohol-fuelled doubts also surrounded my opinions of the 2010 vintage, where the inclusion of some ripe, turbo-charged Merlot in the blend, more so here than at Château Haut-Brion, pushed the finished wine north of 15% in terms of alcoholic strength. This didn’t seem apparent on the palate, but it is one wine I am looking forward to revisiting (although I am not holding my breath on that one).
