Enivrez-vous: Bordeaux 2009 Revisited
Enivrez-vous sans-cesse!
De vin, de poésieou de vertu, à votre guise.
Intoxicate yourself endlessly!
With wine, poetry, or virtue, as you wish.
– Enivrez-vous, Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire (1869)
The past few months have seen a host of vertical tasting reports make their way onto the Winedoctor pages, the most recently featured properties including Château d’Armailhac (1989 – 2023), Château Larcis Ducasse (1959 – 2023) and Château Phélan-Ségur (2004 – 2023), with at least a dozen more lined up for publication in coming months. Joining these reports during the course of 2026 (beyond the customary primeurs report on the 2025 vintage, and the livrables tastings at the end of the year) will be a series of mini-horizontal tasting reports, featuring – if all goes to plan – four different vintages.
I have 2022, 2009, 2005 and 2000 lined up. The logical process would be to start at 2022 and work backwards, or at 2000 and work forwards.
So obviously I am starting with 2009.
When I pulled these bottles from the cellar where they have rested for the best part of the last 17 years I did not expect to open my report with a quote from poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867). When I turned the bottle of 2009 Chasse-Spleen around in my hand though, and spotted the above quote written across the top of the label, the introduction rather wrote itself.
I was moved to take a fresh look at a selection of wines from the 2009 vintage because of a few comments I read suggesting the wines were tiring and past their best. This did not sound right to me given the early potential (at the primeurs, and retasting the wines after bottling) I saw within the vintage, which at first glance was ripe and seductive, but taking a longer look at the wines they would always reveal a tannic structure, rich and confident but deeply buried within the texture and plush fruit of the warm-vintage profile. This structure suggested to me they had great cellaring potential, and we should be looking to cellar some wines over decades.
