Bordeaux 2005 at Two Years: Pessac-Léognan
The 2005 vintage is one that has been described in many corners as a universal success, but the brush that such commentators are using is perhaps a little too broad. It is true that as you travel from commune to commune you will find successful wines in every region, in a much more reliable fashion than is usual. But there are also some where a note of caution is perhaps advised, and Graves is one such region. Here my concern lies not with the red wines, which on the whole are very good indeed, and I will let my notes speak for themselves with regard to these. It is with the white wines that my concern lies.
Reviewing my scores for the white wines of the 2005 vintage I see that although there are one or two stand-outs, on the whole many of my scores are quite similar to those for the 2004 vintage. This is where scores fall down – they try to boil down many different aspects of a wine into a single, arbitrary, pseudo-scientific and supposedly precise single-point description. How can a score allow for a flavoursome but low acid wine, versus one with better structure but perhaps less exciting flavour? We might agree that a third wine taking only the positive attributes of flavour and structure would be the best, but how does a points system differentiate between the first two?
