Twenty Years On: The 1996 Vintage, Other Regions
Looking beyond Champagne and the Loire Valley, here I present a few tasting notes on wines from a variety of other regions, both in France and beyond. I kick off with a trio from Bordeaux; this is a vintage well represented in my cellar (certainly in the case of the left bank, anyway) as it is a long-term favourite of mine. I didn’t pull every cork I could have simply because I fancied a little variety, but I was certainly happy to have another taste of the 1996 from Château Haut-Bailly, an impressive from a vintage in which Pessac-Léognan did not experience quite the same level of success as the communes of the Médoc peninsula, such as Pauillac and Margaux.
Of the other wines tasted I was most taken with the 1996 Bin 707 from Penfolds, a truly remarkable, fresh but concentrated and slightly brooding wine. With just 13.5% alcohol declared, this was an impressive showing and made me question why – with my love of left-bank Bordeaux, and also wines made using both Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc from the Loire Valley – why I don’t explore other wine regions through this variety. As that probably means the Napa Valley as well as the high-end of the Australian wine scene, perhaps the answer is simply because of the price? Or perhaps the fact that they don’t tend to be 13.5% any more?
The 1996 Hermitage La Chapelle from Jaboulet did not disappoint. This is not a wine I buy any more, but I remember drinking many vintages from the 1980s and early 1990s with glee. It went off the boil after 1998, and although I see no reason why quality should not have recovered under the direction of Caroline Frey, it isn’t – with my focus being the Loire Valley and Bordeaux – something I have investigated for myself. I was also really struck by the character of the 1996 Quinta do Vesuvio, and the 1996 Madeira Colheita Canteiro Verdelho from Barbeito, two high-quality wines of Portuguese origin neither of which, if memory serves me correctly, were overly expensive when I bought them (quite a few years ago now though).
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