Ten Years On: The 1998 Vintage
Think back to the vinous successes of 1998 and there are two regions within France that immediately spring to mind: the southern Rhône Valley, and the right bank appellations of Bordeaux, principally St Emilion and Pomerol. Neither, however, have any significant representation here, in my annual Ten Years On tasting.
There are two reasons for this; in the case of the Rhône it is because I have already taken a look at the region earlier in the year. Contradicting the prevailing opinion given above, I didn’t find the vintage here to be the great success it is made out to be; for my palate, there were too many hot and baked fruit characteristics, some wines tasting more of soy sauce and balsamic vinegar than anything made from a grape. Of the three wines included below, one was really very disappointing, the second showed better than I was expecting from my last tasting whereas the third, the Vieilles Vignes from Domaine de la Janasse, was very good, and just kept getting better. I think of it as a very patchy rather than successful vintage. And as for Bordeaux, I have already very briefly cast the spotlight on the vintage for this region in my 1998 Bordeaux vintage review and tasting earlier this year. This feature looked at a small selection of wines from across all Bordeaux, with only a handful of wines from the right bank, quite simply because the vintage isn’t well represented in my cellar. For those who would like more opinion, however, the notes from my assessment of 1998 St Emilion may be of interest, even if they are now quite dated.
Otherwise in this tasting I flitted around, stopping in Burgundy the longest, taking in a selection of wines from the likes of Robert Chevillon and Georges Mugneret, of which the latter showed best I think. It was not a great vintage for the region, but neither was it a universally awful one, and indeed I have seen the wines split informed opinion before now. I don’t have sufficient tasting experience of the vintage to make any such comment, but the wines tasted here certainly included some good ones, although this may reflect the vignerons more than the vintage. Anthony Hanson, writing in Burgundy (1999), has described the year as “a vintage of irregular quality, due to the variety of weather problems”, citing grey rot as a particular difficulty.
