Overall Bordeaux 2006 reds can be summed up as firm, quite strong, structured wines, but for me often a bit joyless. This was certainly my immediate impression having tasted ninety or so wines from the vintage at the Master of Wine Institute’s Annual Claret tasting that took place in the wonderfully oak panelled, if rather gloomy, Vintners Hall last week. The best wines had good structure, acid and enough flesh to make complex wine eventually but the best do need time in bottle. Even mature these will always be firm wines I reckon as in this vintage there is plenty of tannin, albeit it ripe and fine enough. There were also quite a few disappointments and the vintage is not consistent across all the appellations.

The Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux held its annual horizontal tasting of the most recently bottled vintage, in this case the 2008 vintage, on Tuesday at Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House. It’s a great event where you have a hundred plus Chateaux proprietors all under one roof showing their wares – although there is never quite enough time to taste them all. More detailed notes will follow and the vintage profiles will be updated. Sadly I missed out on Sauternes and Barsac, despite skipping lunch to continue tasting, the end of session bell being rung just as I arrived at Bastor Lamontagne…I don’t know how I quite managed that error. Nevertheless overall tasting the 2008s reds was a far more enjoyable experience than working through last year’s austere, tricky 2007 vintage. The few whites from Pessac-Léognan I tasted looked very racy and attractive with more zip than 2009.

At long last the Medoc Cru Bourgeois hiatus is over. Following the legal challenges that overthrew the controversial 2003 classification, Frederique de Lamothe, the director of the l’Alliance de Cru Bourgeois du Medoc [www.crus-bourgeois.com] announced last week, after three years of painstaking effort, the first new selection of wines entitled to the Cru Bourgeois name. It is not, in fact, a classification at all this time round, rather a list of those wines that have met a set of standards which entitles them to use the term. 243 Chateau have been selected from a total of 290 that applied for inclusion, a selection made following blind tastings based on the 2008 vintage conducted by a panel made up of professional tasters, this time with no chateau owners involved, one of the main gripes of those who felt unfairly treated in the 2003 classification.  

Chateau Haut-Marbuzet and Chateau Ormes de Pez are two of the most popular and tasty St Estèphe crus bourgeois you can find. They head up the bevy of excellent non-classed growth wines in the St Estèphe appellation and it was interesting to see how they both faired in the 2005 vintage.