Bordeaux 2007 at Two Years: St Emilion & Pomerol
I have presented my notes here in the usual order of St Emilion followed by Pomerol, although on the day I tasted in reverse, starting at La Pointe and finishing up at Canon. The issue with St Emilion was as expected one of extraction, with a number of the wines – the usual culprits plus one or two other less frequent offenders – showing huge walls of tannin. Worryingly, even the usually divinely elegant Troplong-Mondot seems to have joined this gang. This continued trend for energetic extraction in this appellation is troubling, especially in the context of a vintage where the wines generally have leaner fruit and less texture. Nevertheless, I do have to admit that the overtly extracted wines did tend to show more substance than those wines with less tannin, at least helping to bring a sense of balance.
A peculiar feature I noted when writing up my notes, one that I have already alluded to in my introduction, is that I scored a trio of wines significantly lower than I did when tasting during the primeurs, the three in question being Clos Fourtet, La Gaffelière and Pavie-Macquin. In each case I had two opportunities to revisit the samples during the primeur week – these three being the only wines for which I did this – so my earlier assessment was based on two tastings rather then just one. Could this be responsible for an overly optimistic early assessment? Did I look harder at these three samples, summing up the positive points from each interaction with the wine to produce an overly optimistic score? Or is it just that, without the flesh they showed during the primeurs, they today display their somewhat ungainly structure more prominently, and my double tasting of the primeur samples was nothing more than a red herring? Perhaps. Perhaps that old healer time will tell; I look forward to my next opportunity to taste this trio again, at four years of age, in 2011.
