Twenty-Five Years On: The 1989 Vintage
Although Bordeaux and the Loire Valley dominate my cellar just as these two regions feature most heavily (almost exclusively) in my writing, there is always room for other bottles. My buying from regions besides these two tends to be driven by my beliefs about food and wine matching. With slow-roasted shoulder of lamb, for example, for me nothing can top a mature Rioja, and so I occasionally buy a few bottles from my favourite bodegas, such as López de Heredia, Marqués de Murrieta and La Rioja Alta. With light lunches I really enjoy a Riesling from the likes of Joh. Jos. Prüm or Joh. Jos. Christoffel Erben, although I have such huge stocks from the 2001, 2005 and 2007 other vintages that I don’t feel the need to add any more to the cellar right now. I also buy, from time to time, styles that Bordeaux and the Loire Valley simply don’t provide; the best sparkling Vouvray and Crémant de Loire is, of course, superior to the vast majority of Champagne, so I rarely have need for expensive fizz, but no region in the world can provide us with what the Douro, Jerez and Madeira have to offer.
The point is, although about 80% of my cellar is Bordeaux and the Loire Valley, the other 20% is more diverse than you might think, albeit with an undeniable leaning towards the Old World. But with time these other bottles are drunk up, while my two favoured regions soldier on, partly because I started out with so many more bottles, partly because I am always on the look out for mature bottles from these regions. All in the name of research, I hope you understand. And so it should perhaps be no surprise to see that this tasting of wines at 25 years of age features almost exclusively the Loire Valley and Bordeaux, with a single German Riesling bringing up the rear.
The Loire Valley
Although this was a fine vintage along the length of the Loire Valley, from Muscadet up to Sancerre, the wines in my cellar are exclusively from the Vouvray appellation. The growing season was a very benevolent one, an early flowering meaning the vines were a full three weeks ahead as summer arrived, a summer which was warm and largely dry with only occasional light rainfall, consolidating this early advantage. In Vouvray picking began in late September and as the weather never broke it continued on at a leisurely pace into November. The dry conditions meant that there was not much botrytis, so the wines are largely made from passerillé fruit, giving them a great, minerally purity, and making for an obvious contrast with the vintage that followed, the botrytis-rich 1990.
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