Despite the freezing conditions, many of the great and good from the wine trade made the annual pilgrimage to Suffolk to re-taste the much vaunted 2009s.
This was the vintage of the century, a vintage that boasts 17 hundred point wines, so how do they stack up three and a bit years on? Well the first observation is the tannins. From barrel, these were almost undetectable. Most of our notes referred to silky, velvety tannins, mainly masked by opulent fruit. Today, the wines are quite obviously tannic. They have lost some of that hedonistic quality and have gained in structure. This all bodes well for long term storage, but may put impatient souls off...
Another surprise was just how big a gulf there is between the top names and the low-mid-range Clarets. vignerons and negociants declared 2009 to be a 'great', 'homogenous' vintage with quality produced from top to bottom. They are right, many of the smaller estates have produced their best wines in 2009, but from the evidence of this tasting, you cannot expect to obtain First Growth quality on a cru bourgeois budget. At the affordable level the likes of Gloria,
Clos des Quatre Vents,
Poujeaux, Roc de Cambes, Lafon Rochet, Langoa Barton and
Haut Batailley all had very strong showings and offer very good QPR (quality price ratio).