two 2006's in bottle

With the big tasting of 2006 Bordeaux in Southwold recently (it has been variously written up by Jancis Robinson and more) I thought it would be a good idea to serve - blind - two Bordeaux 2006's from two of our strong Bordeaux connections, there was another reason for one of them but I'll come on to that later. The lab mice for this tasting was the private sales team (if you want an opinion this is where to go) at 9am on tuesday (hoping it will have been the first drink of the day)...


All they were told was that the wines were from the same vintage and were both from Bordeaux in the £200-£400/cs price bracket.......



Wine 1 - La Grave a Pomerol 2006 (sells at £235ib/cs). Overall score 17 and the view on drinking was now onwards but with no great rush so let's say 2010-2016. Now what is strange about this score given that we can be quite a critical lot, and yet gave an unknown wine 17 (the scores ranged from 16-17.5+), is that it gets a shocker of a write up from Mr Parker and a poultry 80 points. We'll have to let him off as it only has one note and that was a year ago. I will see if it get re-tasted now it is bottled.

Wine 2 - Roc de Cambes 2006 (£155ib/cs(6)). Overall score 18 with scores from 17.5 to 19 with the view on drinking being 2011 (although it is pretty "sexy" now) to 2016+. There are no score from the critics but I was so impressed by the 2005 Roc when I tasted in Bordeaux that as soon as I heard the 2006 was good I bought some then.

The contrast in the wines was marked and great to see. The La Grave a more classically inspired wine with such good fruit and decent grip but the sort of claret you can get stuck into. The Roc was more dense (but not heavy) had a richer texture and a little more "lip-gloss". As we have found over the years this is a great wine to serve blind to someone as it punches well above it's weight! If you see it available the 2002 and 2004 are really worth buying too and there is a common thread with them and this 2006.

So that's that...a 17 and an 18, just good wines at a very fair price