Farr Vintners, the UK wine merchant, held an interesting tasting of 22 of the top wines of Bordeaux 2005 last month at Vintners' Hall in London. Among the tasters were the leading critics Jancis Robinson MW and the Wine Spectator's Bordeaux correspondent James Suckling. Both filed extensive tasting notes and from their reports it seems clear that as a vintage it is living up to the hype.
Suckling was overwhelmingly positive about the wines: "If I can generalize about the wines, I was impressed how in balance they all were. The tannins in the wines were not hard and aggressive. They were ripe, velvety-textured and in harmony. They were a joy to taste. In fact, they were so good that they made you want to drink them. That's what great wine is all about."
Robinson was equally enthusiastic: "These wines looked stunning. Wines are not always flattered by being shown together, in the early evening, without food. But in these wines there was shortage of anything – colour, acid, tannin, fruit, richness – but they were also brilliantly etched…. I still feel this is by far the greatest Bordeaux vintage I have been lucky enough to taste."
Below is a table that compares the scores the two critics gave at the October tasting with those they awarded previously (for Robinson this was following en primeur in 2006 and for Suckling in April of this year when the wines were bottled). As you would expect, Robinson's notes differ more than Suckling's. It is worth noting that Robinson gave upgrades to a number of the mid-ranked wine, particularly Pontet Canet, Leoville Barton and Lynch Bages. Both critics upgraded Pichon Baron, which is perhaps the value pick at £820 a case. Of some surprise were the scores for Eglise Clinet (one of only two wines from the vintages awarded 100 points by Robert Parker) although Suckling also states that he "tasted the wines a couple of weeks ago and it was magic. So perhaps we had a slightly off bottle or the wine was going through a weird stage? I am not worried its classic quality."
Also of worth reading is an interview given by Robert Parker to a regional US newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, following a tutored tasting he gave on the 2005 vintage. In it he makes a number of interesting points about the vintage and reaffirms his view that, "it's the most consistent vintage from top to bottom I've ever tasted", but that, "the question I raise is will the legends, the first growths, the museum pieces, eclipse their best of the past? I really don't know. I have some doubts…"
For those who like to bet on future upgrades, one wine at the tasting stood out. "He pauses over another wine. 'Beautiful nose. It's a great, great wine. Maybe the Wine Spectator got that right,' he says. The magazine gave the wine, the 2005 Chateau l'Evangile from Pomerol, 100 points, tops on the scale that Parker introduced to wine criticism three decades ago and which today is widely emulated by other critics. Parker gave the wine 95 points."
It has been well documented that 2005 has been hit the hardest by the current market downturn, with the First Growth's in particular as much as third cheaper than they were in spring. But with prices for the majority of the wines from 2005 now well below those for for the respective 2000s, one question remains: when do they become buying opportunities?
