Ten Years On: The 1996 Vintage
The 1996 vintage was for some regions a success, for others a dismal failure. As usual my annual inspection of a seemingly random collection of wines at ten years of age takes some account of this, but this year there are one or two notable exceptions to my line up which perhaps merit some discussion.
The success of Bordeaux in the 1996 vintage is, strange though it seems to me, still open to debate. My personal opinion is that many of the left bank wines were a great success, showing a lot of pure Cabernet character. Others are less enthusiastic, and some prefer the 1995 vintage, a position I find increasingly difficult to understand, unless they are looking specifically at the right bank, where I suspect it is true that 1995 trumps 1996 on quality. So a ten-year-on tasting should certainly look at Bordeaux, at least the left bank, but I have not done so here, save for a single lesser Pauillac Grand Cru Classé. The simple reason is that my cellar is littered with wines from this vintage, just single bottles for some of the minor wines, and I think I would rather wait and look at Bordeaux in a more detailed tasting of the wines as they mature, sometime next year.
In Burgundy there was success, for red and white wines, with Chablis being particularly successful, although there were also some very good wines produced all along the length of the Cote d’Or. Provided one can find a bottle that isn’t damaged by the oxidation problem that has plagued this region from 1996 onwards, one may have a very good wine indeed. Chardonnay and Pinot Noir were much more successful, however, when sourced from further north, specifically from Champagne. Despite this, I have included only a single wine as a token representative of this region. With Champagnes from this vintage in abundance, like Bordeaux, I will be looking at these in more detail some time in the future. The Rhône Valley was not a huge success in 1996, there were good but on the whole (there are almost always exceptions) not great wines produced. In the Loire, this vintage was really rather a success, for both red and white wines. I couldn’t resist including a couple from one of the region’s leading producers.
In Spain, 1996 was a success in Rioja, although the quality did not on the whole match the preceding two vintages, both of which were excellent, and it was not a declared vintage for the Port houses. Germany enjoyed another successful vintage, a cool summer leading to a successful late harvest with low yields, although largely devoid of botrytis.
