Fifteen Years On: The 2000 Vintage
After the success of the regional theme applied to my 2005 Ten Years On tasting, featuring Germany (as well as a little Jurançon just to finish off) I continue this vague sense of structure with my 2000 Fifteen Years On report. The obvious place for me to go would be to Bordeaux, where the vintage was largely hailed as a success, and I am not exactly short of wines I could pull from the cellar to meet this plan. Nevertheless, I decided to leave these wines to one side, and perhaps I will come back to them sometime next year. So too for the few bottles of Chinon and Savennières I still have from this vintage. Instead, I decided to look to other regions, with a ‘traditional’ tasting format. To start, a few bottles of fizz from a little-known sparkling wine region called Champagne, which is in the north of France (perhaps you have heard of it?), followed by a small flight of white Burgundy, then a slew of red wines from both the northern and southern sections of the Rhône Valley.
Champagne 2000
The season in Champagne didn’t start in a promising fashion. Although spring was dry and benevolent, during June and July there were several episodes of hail, destroying about 10% of the crop, and limiting quality across much of the rest of the vineyard. In August the weather was warm, and accelerated ripening, so that the fruit largely attained a rich degree of ripeness. The harvest was underway by mid-September and was rather drawn-out, not finishing until early October. Although there was clearly the potential for quality, this would only come with very strict selections, in what was regarded from the outset in the region as a good rather than great vintage, one where many houses concentrated on non-vintage cuvées rather than vintage wines.
I must admit that the bottles here were bought many years ago, generally upon release, at a time when I would often buy certain wines – such as the vintage releases from Pol Roger and Bollinger – every year (if declared, obviously). This is something I no longer do, and the reasons for this are many. It is partly to do with time, in that I can’t taste and drink everything, and I would rather get to know the sparkling wines of the Loire Valley a little better than sup on yet another too-familiar glass of Champagne. It is also because the wines seem to be following the Bordeaux model of pricing, and even the entry-level non-vintage cuvées cost more than many bottles of cru classé Bordeaux. Thirdly, I am not sure I want much to do with a region that persecutes other producers who they deem to be infringing their label copyright, and take to court wine critics who don’t seem to toe the line. The lawyers in Reims and Épernay have been busier than ever in 2015. Is that what wine should be about?
Having said all that, I still have quite a few older bottles secreted in the cellar. I am slowly depleting my stock as the years go by, so mature vintages will crop up from time to time. Of the three wines chosen here, the Bollinger Grand Année was superb, perhaps the first vintage when I saw a definite shift away from the more overtly oxidative house style, while the Pol Roger was close behind. The wine from Pierre Gimonnet was looking rather tired though.
