Twenty Years On: The 1989 Vintage
Last year’s Twenty Years On tasting, featuring the 1988 vintage, was a very subtle affair, to put it kindly. A mere handful of wines that were celebrating their 20th birthday, representing the Loire, Bordeaux (in the shape of Sauternes), Châteauneuf du Pape and the Mosel. In the grand scheme of wine tastings, and even just those tastings I feature here on Winedoctor, it was an insignificant event. Nevertheless, for me it was an important primer, a line-up indicative of a progressively maturing cellar, and a doorway onto future tastings of increasingly mature wines. From now onwards (or rather, from last year onwards), my Twenty Years On tastings – previously rather sporadic – will be a regular feature on Winedoctor. And these events will be important for me; looking at wines in maturity is an essential practise if we are to understand wines in their youth, which is of course the time when we most commonly taste and judge them, judgements which we must use to project a future for the wine, predicting its potential for the cellar.
All of the wines featured in this tasting originate from the classic viticultural regions of Europe – sadly my cellar is very weak when it comes to twenty year-old wines from the New World – and for some of these regions 1989 was the second year in a triumvirate of successful vintages. That is certainly true of Champagne, and coincidentally a tasting of 1989 vintage Champagne was one of the earliest tastings posted on the original Winedoctor site, back in June 2000. Sandwiched between the fabulous 1988 and 1990 vintages, many commentators on the region would place 1989 slightly behind its two neighbours in terms of quality, although that is no real criticism. Both 1988 and 1990 qualify for entry into the pantheon of great 20th century vintages, whereas 1989, a very warm vintage which saw the Champagne vines ripen their grapes with ease, is ‘merely’ excellent.
The Loire also saw an excellent harvest, but whereas in Champagne it was an admittedly superb but not supreme year, here in the Loire it was certainly one of the greatest vintages of the 20th century. When I last visited Pierre Jacques Druet, just last year, we discussed the 2005 vintage, a great year in the Loire, and Druet threw out only a few years worthy of comparison. He chose just a trio of Loire vintages, these three being 1921, 1945 and 1989. This latter vintage is clearly a great year for the Loire. Of course, we must not forget what a huge and diverse region the Loire is, and how we relate such generic judgements to regions such as the Nantais, the source of one of the wines here, is open to debate. Further upstream, however, in Vouvray, things are more certain. This region enjoyed a very warm and dry summer, with an early flowering and a safe harvest, the fruit brought in under clear, cloud-free skies. There was the full range of wines produced, from dry through to lusciously sweet, and at Domaine Huet the vintage was notable for the appearance of a new wine, Cuvée Constance, named in honour of Gaston Huet’s mother.
