Twenty Years On: The 1993 Vintage
Every year I like to take a look back at the wines of ten, fifteen and twenty years ago, pulling bottles from my own cellar in order to do so. This year I’m starting with my twenty-year report, which like last year is a rather diminutive one, as I simply don’t have a large selection of wines from this vintage tucked away. Despite there being only a small handful of wines to pull I have decided to keep the ‘tradition’ going mainly because next year, with the arrival of 1994, I should be able to put together a reasonable report once again.
It perhaps doesn’t matter that the numbers here are so small, as the scope of these reports – in essence, anything goes, provided the vintage is right – is simply too broad for them to be informative in any case. No report that might typically skip across all the classic regions of France, Germany, Spain and Portugal as well as touching on wines from the Americas, South Africa and the Antipodean nations can ever hope to be informative or definitive. The world of wine is just too big for this to be plausible or possible today. Nevertheless, I continue on with them (for the moment at least) simply because looking back at the wines is fun, and this mini-report provides a fine excuse to open some older bottles.
Of note, all the wines in this 1993 Twenty Years On report, as well as those in my 1998 Fifteen Years On and 2003 Ten Years On tasting reports, were opened and drank at home, usually with dinner. They were not slurped and spat in a clinical setting, but were instead enjoyed as wine is meant to be, with food. This explains why my notes can get rather long and lyrical at times – please accept my apologies for that!
Please log in to continue reading: