Château Haut-Bailly, All The Fives, 2016
A visit to Bordeaux throws up all sorts of tasting opportunities. As subscribers will surely already know I tend to avoid the boozy lunches, for reasons I have already written about perhaps too many times, so I won’t revisit them here, lest I begin to sound like a broken record. During the 2015 vintage primeurs I did, however, accept two stomach-fortifying invitations, one of which was to Château Haut-Bailly.
During the primeurs Véronique Sanders and her team offer lunch, perhaps as an incentive to draw in visitors to the domaine following the estate’s withdrawal from Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux activities two years ago. It is an informal serve-yourself affair of which I decided to take advantage in order to strengthen my resolve before heading off for the Pessac-Léognan syndicat tasting, followed by the drive south to Sauternes, and my annual visits to Château Climens and Château Raymond-Lafon. It was a wise decision, because this informal lunch came with four informally poured wines which were of real interest.
Four Vintages, 2005 to 1975
There is a notion that vintages ending in a ‘5’ in Bordeaux have, in recent years, tended to be of good quality. This has of course again bubbled to the surface with the 2015 vintage which, I suppose, does nothing to dispel this belief. Following the theme, the team at Château Haut-Bailly decided to pour the four most recent vintages in bottle ending in ‘5’ with lunch. So after sitting down with Véronique Sanders and Robert Wilmers for a taste of the 2015 primeurs sample, which was hugely convincing (the vintage is much stronger in Pessac-Léognan than it is in much of the Médoc), and with a fortifying platter of foie gras to hand, I got stuck into these older wines.
