Loire 2005 at Ten Years
In the Winedoctor annual tasting calendar, there are certain regular fixtures. There are the Bordeaux primeurs, of course, the week in April when Winedoctor readership (and new subscriptions) usually hits its peak. Then there is the review of the most recently bottled Bordeaux vintage, which this year will be Bordeaux 2013 (no booing at the back please), a report I write off the back of the annual Union des Grands Crus tasting, as well as another visit to Bordeaux, in October. I also review the wines of Bordeaux at four years of age, thanks to an interesting tasting hosted each November by the Institute of Masters of Wine. This year’s focus was 2011 Bordeaux. And then there is the Bordeaux vintage at ten years of age, a joyful chance to look at the wines once again as they approach early maturity. This year I looked at Bordeaux 2005; it’s a hard job, but somebody has to do it.
The Loire Valley, sadly, simply can’t match this intensive timetable. Each year, after returning from the Salon des Vins de Loire in February, I manage to put together a primeurs-style report, maybe looking at 80 to 100 wines (a fraction of what I taste during the Bordeaux primeurs). Reviewing the wines as they mature, at two, four or ten years of age, has always been more of a challenge though. There is no Union des Grands Crus equivalent in the Loire Valley, and there is no grand institute foisting the wines upon prospective MWs and other malingerers such as myself. And no London merchant is nailing their colours to the mast with an annual tasting of ten-year old Chinon and Vouvray, no matter how wonderful such a tasting could be. So that leaves me with just one option. Buy the wines, and facilitate the review from my own cellar. Which is exactly what I have done in order to pen this, my first Loire Valley ten years on tasting.
Why Ten Years On?
Most of my Loire Valley reporting is centred around profiles and tasting updates, featuring any number of wines from a single domaine. As my introduction above suggests, however, I have long wished to be able to carry out vintage reviews as the wines mature. This is going to have to be from my own cellar. To do so as frequently as I do for Bordeaux is not, however, going to be practical, and so I settled on an annual review of the vintage at ten years of age, for several reasons.
