Bordeaux 2006 at Four Years
The fading of the leaves from green to shades of golden yellow, vibrant red and ultimately deathly brown signals not only the tightening grip of autumn, but also the arrival of young Bordeaux tasting-time. I wish I could attend every Bordeaux tasting opportunity that exists in the UK, for they are legion, but I have settled on two regular dates as essential components in my annual tasting regimen, the bare minimum in my yearly Bordeaux “data set”. The rest I squeeze in, if and when I can. These two events, both reliably informative in my experience, are tastings of young Bordeaux vintages not long in bottle. I see these assessments as being most valuable for Winedoctor, tastings of the finished and bottled wines which hopefully remove the veil of hazy uncertainty that naturally accompanies any tasting notes on barrel samples, such as those at the annual primeurs circus.
The first of these two dates with Bacchus is the Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux (UGC) tasting in the third week of October, a tasting of the vintage at two years of age, freshly bottled, most recently the 2008 vintage, and the second is the annual Institute of Masters of Wine (IMW) tasting in the first week of November. This latter event showcases the wines four years from the date the fruit was harvested. Not only is each tasting individually of merit, but coming so close together they do tend to encourage comparison of one vintage with the other. Benchmarking vintages in this way is only natural; just how many times have you read a Bordeaux commentator trying to communicate the style of a vintage with “a little like 1988, only the tannins are rather more like 2005, but with the freshness of 1996“, or some other similar vintage mash-up, in the latest harvest report? To understand vintages through contrasts and comparisons with those we already know can be useful, establishing a place for the wines in our own personal Bordeaux pantheon.
