Bordeaux 2015 at Ten Years
“Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!”
– The White Rabbit, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Lewis Carroll
The year 2015 marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, among the best-known novels of the Victorian era and a keystone in the literary nonsense style.
Alice’s adventures began to take shape one sunny summer afternoon in July 1862. Lewis Carroll was out rowing with friends near Oxford, and as their boat drifted along he invented a story in order to keep the younger members of their party entertained. It is this tale which would metamorphose over the next few years to eventually emerge from its chrysalis, in 1865, as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
I think all of Carroll’s characters are now famous in their own right. After all, who is not familiar with the image of the White Rabbit, always running late, with pocket watch in hand? This image seems pertinent to my review of the wines of the 2015 vintage in Bordeaux as they hit ten years of age as, like the White Rabbit, this report is also running late. These notes were scheduled for publication sometime during 2025. Some of the wines were tasted as long as eleven months ago.
I recently learnt, however, that Carroll’s inspiration for the White Rabbit’s permanent tardiness was that he was running on Oxford Time. Before the advent of the railways and a standardised national time, clocks in Oxford were 5 minutes and 2 seconds (precisely!) behind those in London. Some colleges in Oxford University continue this tradition today, keeping their clocks 5 minutes behind Greenwich Time. In other words, these academic enclaves effectively have their own time zone.
So too, I have decided, does Winedoctor Towers; it runs exactly one year behind the rest of the world. And on this basis I proudly announce the publication of my 2015 Bordeaux at Ten Years report. Not eleven months late; instead, according to WDT (the acronym for my new time zone), this article is in fact one month early.
I will pause a moment for this to sink in, and for the necessary round of applause….
While you ponder my Carroll-esque logic I will crack on with a brief recap on the 2015 growing season, before I add another 70-plus tasting notes to the ever-growing Winedoctor database, from the Left Bank and the Right Bank.
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