Chateau Léoville Poyferré – one of a bevy of Parker 100 point wines in 2009

What an extraordinary day yesterday! From what I could see there was phenomenal trade in top Bordeaux 2009 ahead of Robert Parker’s final scores on this vintage now it’s in bottle. It’s the final word, for now, on what is clearly one of the most remarkable vintages of modern claret. James Suckling gave it a huge thumbs up last week and from what I’ve seen reported Robert Parker has awarded no fewer than 18 perfect scores in his latest Wine Advocate published yesterday. I watched prices climb dramatically on Farr Vintner’s website and elsewhere throughout the day, particularly for the dozen or so new ‘first growths’ – the likes of Léoville Poyferré, Pontet Canet and rest that have [now] been duly awarded the Parker perfect one hundred score. What a days work that must have been in fine wine brokers the world over? It’ll be a big day again today as his scores and comments fully dissected and digested.

Terrific effort by Cos d’Estournel in 2007

Only four wines were shown from the St Estèphe appellation at the MW Institute tasting but Chateau Cos d’Estournel has turned in an excellent effort in 2007. Chateau Montrose meanwhile felt much more backward and Chateau Cos Labory and Chateau Lafon Rochet both felt light and lacking in depth. It’s really worth searching out their 2006s, 2008s and 2009s instead.

With the first Bordeaux 2010 releases starting to trickle out [at prices that seem on par to 2009] I’ve culled my tasting notes down by score for the vintage for the top thirty reds, the a dozen likely best value reds and then a dozen best dry and sweet whites as I saw it. It’s a snapshot obviously. Hope it’s helpful. The full notes for each chateau review can be found either by backtracking down the previous posts, through the search box or down under the Bordeaux Vintage 2010 profile.

Overall 2010 is dense and intense in Pauillac. The wines are less easy to enjoy than ’09, without that easy flamboyance but they do have phenomenal strength and power, with lots tannin and grip too. It will be very interesting to see how they settle. So the best wines are different in style rather than in quality over ’09. Generally I was seduced more by the style of ’09 in Pauillac to ’10. That said amongst the first growths Mouton has produced an even better wine in ’10 than in ’09, Lafite is perfect but very concentrated and dense and feels less elegant and seductive over ’09. Latour is very dense, concentrated and quite amazing – and almost equalled by a quite extraordinary Les Forts de Latour. Carruades de Lafite is no slouch this year and neither is Le Petit Mouton de Mouton Rothschild.