Château-Thébaud Retrospective, 2018 to 2001
After our adventures exploring the region’s vineyards, followed by our tasting of recent vintages from Famille Lieubeau, we moved onto a retrospective of the family’s Château-Thébaud cuvée. Vincent and François Lieubeau poured a dozen vintages, the first three samples from cuve, the latter all from bottle; I present all my tasting notes further down the page, but a handful of wines were exceptionally good and deserve special mention here.
Starting with the bottled wines, I was expecting the 2012 (one of my favourite vintages in the region) to be superior, and indeed it was one of the top wines poured from bottle, easily in my top three. I was slightly surprised, however, to find it usurped by the 2010; while this has always been a very good vintage for the cru communal style I have often found its wines to show a little less finesse compared with the more crisply defined cuvées coming from 2012. Nevertheless on this occasion the 2010 equipped itself very well, showing polished fruit but also vibrant and shimmering acidity, and it was clearly the better wine. On this encounter, anyway.
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