Loire 2005 at Fifteen Years
I am not sure whether it was impatience or anxiety, but last year I delved into the deepest and darkest recesses of my cellar to pull out eight wines, all Chinon, all from the 2005 vintage, all at the time not quite fourteen years of age. One year too early, you might say.
If it was anxiety, I need not have worried. The wines, from some of the most highly regarded vineyard sites in the Chinon appellation, and from some of the very best domaines, were all in tip-top shape, with no signs in any of them to suggest imminent decline. Indeed, not only were they in good shape, but all the wines looked to be still in the ascendant, still rich with texture to give and tannin to shake down, before they hit that Cabernet Franc silky sweet spot which only comes with age.
While this might be expected from the limestone cuvées, from the vines high up on the slopes above the Vienne (well, as high as you get in this corner of the wine world – it’s not quite the hill of Hermitage) the fact that it could also be said of Philippe Alliet’s Vieilles Vignes and Bernard Baudry’s Les Grézeaux cuvées, both from vines on the valley floor, was also very reassuring. The former hails from sandy soils at Briançon, the latter from a rich gravelly terroir opposite Bernard’s house, a stone’s throw from the domaine on the road to Cravant-les-Coteaux. Conventional wisdom says both should be drunk young, or certainly not this old. Conventional wisdom, on this occasion at least, appeared to have been wrong.
Suitably reassured, I put my feet up for a year as far as this vintage was concerned. But time flies, and as the wines neared their true fifteenth birthday it was clearly time to revisit the vintage in a more formal fashion. And this time I take a much broader look, not just at Chinon but at wines from along the length and breadth of the river; in this tasting report published in four instalments I report on 40 wines in all, looking at the dry white wines in part two, the red wines in part three and the demi-sec and moelleux cuvées in part four (while I drink sec tendre and demi-sec wines at table as I would a dry wine, I tend to include them with the sweeter wines in these reports, just to balance up the distribution of the tasting notes).
