Twenty Years On: The 1997 Vintage
Following on from my 1997 Loire retrospective tasting, published yesterday, today I follow up with a mixed bag of tasting notes from a wide variety of regions from the same vintage, starting with Bordeaux and ending up in the Douro (always a good place to end up), via the Rhône Valley, the Languedoc, Alsace, Germany and Lebanon (no prizes for guessing the identity of the wine from this country).
As far as I am concerned all these wines are old and familiar friends, the majority of them having been acquired immediately (or at the very least soon) after release. All of them have appeared somewhere before on Winedoctor, many of them when I put together a 1997 Fifteen Years On back in 2012. While I enjoy drinking these older vintages, in most cases these wines are not representative of styles I buy anymore. I try not to buy Sauternes simply because I have so much of it tucked away, while my changing tastes mean I no longer feel drawn to the warm climate styles offered up by the Rhône Valley, the Languedoc or Lebanon. But this is part and parcel of being a committed wine drinker. Over time our palates evolve, and our cellars must follow suit.
This is not, of course, meant to be a detailed examination of any particular region or style, the wines are simply too few for that. It is an informal look at a few maturing wines brought up from my cellar. There is really no justification for a prolonged introduction, or review of the vintage, other than to say that my impressions on tasting this small collection of wines is that the 1997 vintage was excellent for Sauternes (but not red Bordeaux, not featured here), for the sweet wines of the Mosel and Rhine, and for Port. Everywhere else I suspect quality depends as much on the domaine as anything. (11/10/17)
