Bordeaux 2008 at Two Years: The Médoc Communes
In the Médoc I have a habit of kicking off with St Estèphe, always an unusual experience at the UGC tasting where, with Montrose, Cos d’Estournel and Calon-Ségur never deigning to attend, we are left with a very small sample of cru classé and unclassified estates indeed, usually just four in number. And it is not that unusual for the latter estates (I am trying to avoid referring to them as cru bourgeois, as that classification now refers to an annual award made to a wine rather than a château) to outshine their cru classé peers. I kicked off with Cos Labory which I found impossible to taste as it was still dominated by sulphur (not a common finding in this tasting), and then continued with Château de Pez, owned by the Rouzaud family of Roederer since 1995, and thus now under the same management as Pichon-Lalande (which was acquired in 2007), the wines being poured by none other than Gildas d’Ollone. This was probably my favourite wine from this tiny sampling of the commune.
Pauillac was not quite the most disappointing of the Médoc communes, but the wines were certainly something of a let-down in terms of pre-existing expectations, because the wines had on the whole shown quite well during the primeur tastings. In many cases, although very decent wines, I find that I have scored the wines at the very bottom of the range I awarded them when tasting the barrel samples in 2009, or in some cases a half-point under the range. That is not to say they are bad wines, more that they are not great, and as such perhaps they provide a genuine reflection of the vintage; charming, drinkable, but nothing to swoon over. Well, at least not until we come to the pretenders to the communal crown.
