Bordeaux 2006 at Four Years: St Emilion & Pomerol
As is the case with the 2008 vintage, St Emilion and Pomerol are where it’s at in 2006. The colours of the wines are just fabulous, all crimson and scarlet. The textures are creamy and yet tense and compact, not soft or overly expansive. The flavours here are bright and youthful, each wine keen to display its fruit-richness on both the nose and palate. And the tannins are gritty and ripe, giving the wines wonderful structures and backbone. The wines on the left bank might well be very good, but over here around St Emilion and Pomerol they are very, very good.
They may not be to everyone’s taste of course. As I had finished tasting the right bank wines, suitably impressed by their showing, I overheard one MW (I wasn’t listening into everybody’s conversations, honest!) dismiss them as being nothing more than “fruit and alcohol“. With the comment on fruit I would have to agree. After all, what other flavours are you demanding from your four-year old Bordeaux? And in response to the alcohol comment, this was uncalled for. Yes some of the styles that can be found on the right bank do tend to favour extraction, big tannic structures and, on occasions, an undeniable presence of alcohol. But it’s not a problem in 2006; these aren’t wines dogged by the heat of excess alcohol on the palate. Perhaps it was the 2009 vintage right-bankers he was thinking of?
