Fifteen Years On: The 1998 Vintage
Last year, in the opener to my report on the 1997 vintage at fifteen years of age, I reflected (rather self-indulgently perhaps?) on the many adventures I had experienced that year. Being rather less rose-tinted about it now, it basically involved a marathon tour down to Châteauneuf du Pape and back again, all done in a car that basically wasn’t up to the job, and which (perhaps inevitably) broke down in a quite catastrophic fashion. For my 1998 report at fifteen years, I will get straight down to it with introducing the wines.
Of note, all the wines in this 1998 Fifteen Years On report, as well as those in my 1993 Twenty Years On and 2003 Ten Years On tasting reports published this year, were opened and drank at home, usually with dinner. They were not slurped and spat in a clinical setting, but were instead enjoyed as wine is meant to be, with food. This explains why my notes can get rather long and lyrical at times – please accept my apologies for this!
Alsace & Champagne
This year’s selection is a really varied bunch; whereas I sometimes try to focus on Bordeaux or the Loire, to some extent at least, that isn’t true with 1998. Instead we have one, two or a small handful of wines from a number of different European wine regions. Kicking off come two wines from Alsace, both from Zind-Humbrecht; 1998 was a very good vintage, although not one of the very greatest. The weather seemed to flip from cool to hot in spring, cool again in summer and hot again as harvest time approached. Picking began relatively early, on September 24th. The two wines I confess I am pretty familiar with; having bought them over a decade ago I have been drinking them on and off for the past thirteen years or so; they showed well here, proof of the quality that comes with the Zind-Humbrecht label, and that both Pinot Gris and Gewurztraminer can develop interest with age. Sadly I won’t see how they do in their real ‘old age’, as these were my last bottles from this vintage.
