Clos de Tart 2008....

Having last tasted the Clos de Tart 2008 wines on Day 5 in Burgundy back in November it was great to get the chance this morning to taste the final assemblage, albeit not in final bottle as it will not be bottled unitl April/May. The release of the 2008 will be April and we will be doing a Masterclass with Sylvain Pitiot on 15th April.

I thought the two wines were showing very well (you never quite know with cask samples) and for those lucky enough to get some 2007 I think there will be a massive amount of enjoyment over the years in comparing the two vintages as I feel the quality level is similar but the wine different in profile. To be crude I feel the 2007 will peak earlier and the 2008 is a "keeper" as below...

Les Forges de Tart 1er Cru 2008 - Pungent, spiced but very precise, gorgeous lanolin nose of good oak in the background. The palate is a more Pinot expression...good length and weight. Impressive and just begs to nosed time after time...for me an 18/20

Clos de Tart 2008 - Stylistically similar to the Les Forges but with more power, density and weight. A more broad-shouldered and masculine wine. Darker fruits but still that tell tale spice. Palate is dense and everything is there even if it shows less than the Les Forges (it should) at this stage. A keeper! 18-19/20

Not even time for 11's yet.....

DRC 2007.....not bad for a Monday!

For the first time I can remember (and amazingly this was my 11th vintage) the DRC Press Tasting was on a Monday. As is traditional now the wines are shown to the press just after bottling, which was done in the last two months. The Domaine de la Romanee Conti wines are amazingly easy to taste at this young stage. I have always thought it would not be the case even as little as 3 months later when they start to become constrained by bottling. It’s always a massively exciting tasting regardless of the vintage as you are dealing with the very essence of terroir. The tasting takes a relaxed yet studious tone, there is very little talking at all, whilst Aubert is almost always in attendance, as he was again this year, there is no speech or presentation. The wines are “left” to do the talking themselves. The wines (no Vosnee Romanee 1er Cru Duvault Blochet this year) are tasted in the order below with the Montrachet never shown (more of that later!), the notes are my own and brief….I’m not a massive fan of scores so there aren’t any….each wine taken on its merits, it’s not a competition after all…..

Echezeaux – Beautifully “Pinot”, red fruits, elegant and feminine, good acidity and poise, long finish…very impressive.

Grands Echezeaux – Immediately less obvious than Echezeaux, fruit red again with a hint of something darker, a leafy note and more impressive on the palate than nose at this stage.

Richebourg – As with last year tasted before the Romanee-St-Vivant, Richebourg was more gutsy with a masculine edge, serious and more brooding to me.

Romanee-St-Vivant – Classy and a little more “showy” than the others so far, red fruit again, rich and a touch decadent, the biggest (good) surprise for me.

La Tache – As is often the case (almost always for me) the most obviously performing wine and, if I were pressed, the most impressive, richness and splendor combined, brilliant texture, hidden structure too.

Romanee Conti – The nose showed more than some years, exquisite balance and harmony, palate tighter and giving less away…so impressive and true.

With the tasting over before 12.30 it was brilliant to have a brief window for Aubert to present the wines and vintage to the entire C&B Team, the samples were minute - it’s amazing how far a bottle can go – the entire press and home team requiring less that 2 bottles of each wine!! Aubert is always clam when speaking and manages to make something very complex sound simple. “A vintage that will be for the nose” being one of the more memorable quotes.

From 1 Thomas More Street those that were lunching - Adam, Alison, Rachel and & I were hosting Aubert, Serena Sutcliffe MW, Anthony Hanson MW & Remington Norman MW - moved on to Lunch at C&B Paternoster Square. The post tasting Lunch has been a tradition, a massive personal highlight, and a thank you to Aubert for as long as I can remember. It is a good chance to relax and get the views of some of the wine world’s biggest names. Exciting though this is for me there is nothing to rival the fact that we now taste the Le Montrachet 2007 at lunch. The 2007 was a spectacular wine, especially when you consider it was the last picked of the wines (17th September) and you can well see it. A gorgeous young gold colour and exotic nose, to make an almost farcical comparison it reminded me of the 2005 with a dash more zest and acidity…you could drink it now or at anytime over the next ?? years….as Adam’s tasting note says, Noble Wine. The other wines at lunch were the 2007 Echezeaux, Romanee-St-Vivant & La Tache. In particular the La Tache shone again for me. Conversation flowed – everything from the Hospice auction to Le Corton to the En Primeur 2009 campaign in Bordeaux - but one question I wanted to ask Aubert, because we get asked it a lot, was which vintage the 2007 wines reminded Aubert of. He said the weather was so unique that it was hard but eventually he said a civil marriage (no churches) of 1997 and 2004.

The only problem for me now is what on earth do you do on Tuesday when your Monday is that good?

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

The 2008 Burgundy Tasting...with Alsace, Germany and older vintages!

Last Thursday saw the 2008 Burgundy release tasting at the Tower of London, a venue we are making our “tasting home” for the time being. The format was a pretty tried and trusted one with a press and trade preview from 3pm till 5.30pm and then from 6pm till 8.30pm it was the private customers tasting, with a really good turn out of just under 200 keen tasters. The room was busy all evening without being overcrowded. The wines showed well (it was a "fruit" day after all – that’s to do with biodynamics and for another time all together). I noticed quite a few of the wines having put on a bit of weight since November (wish I could say I hadn’t). This tasting has become very much part of the furniture for us now with people having the chance to tast, as we often do, unfinished wines. One of the exceptions to this were the brilliant wines of young Vincent Dampt which never seem to disappoint. I won't go on about the specific wines here as that is all covered in the offer Allison has written and in the blog enteries from the trip.

As well as the rafts of 2008 we also made an effort to show some older vintages of wines that we have just shipped amongst the whites (pictured) that we showed were some Matrot wines from 2004 & 2006 that arrived last month along with a few Olivier Leflaive’s and the Macon Verze 2007 from Domaines Leflaive. The reds were new arrivals from Varoilles & Arlot. Both tables seemed to go down really well. Arlot and Varoilles both made very good wines in the four star vintage of 2001 which I like very much when we tasted at the Domaines in November and Arlot also showed some wines from the tricky 2004 vintage in which they shone with there finesse orientated style.

It was great to have so many producers on hand to show their wines and our thanks go, in no particular order, to:

Vincent Dampt
Nicolas and Florence Rossignol-Trapet
Gilbert and Delphine Hammel of Domaine de Varoilles
Francois and Miriam Labet of Ch de la Tour and Domaine Pierre Labet
Olivier Leriche of Domaine De L’Arlot
Guillaume d’Angerville
Olivier and Marc-Emmanuel Cyrot
Marion Javillier
Henri Darnat
Thierry, Pascale and Elisa Matrot
Pierre de Benoist of A&P de Villaine

The tasting only promises to get bigger and better each year. Next stop the very exciting 2009 launch next January.

One other point of note was that for the second year we showed our allocation of the immaculate JJ Prum wines. These are hard to taste in their youth as they are reductive (sulphurous) on the nose, this can to a degree be conquered at this early stage by double decanting which we did in the morning of the tasting. The nose takes 3-4years to fully settle but the palate is stunning from the off. The Wehlener Sonnenuhr wines were particularly superb….to be released for sale soon!! For those who still hadn’t fallen to palate fatigue the Trapet wines form Alsace where there to be tasted too.

The Beefeater on duty promptly cleared the room as everyone has to be out of the tower by 9.30 for the Ceremony of the Keys (the Longest continuously running Ceremony of its type in the world I’m informed). A few of us stayed behind to help clear up, once the job was done we were delighted to find a substantial chunk of Taleggio which we washed down with some opened samples! Then it was upto our Jewry Street Winebar for a drink and some food with the producers….. a long but massively worthwhile day….

So what wines do we really like......

As the last week before Christmas was ticking along and everyone was getting tired and at times a little ratty I thought it would be a good idea to do some research….what is the ranking of the great regions and countries amongst the team here. To discover this I took a cross-section which included all the private customer and trade sales people (10 in total – 9 male, 1 female), the “3 Marketeers” (all female) and the buying team (8 – 2 male, 6 female). Then asked them to……”Please rate the regions/countries in each of the sections below (Red, White and Other). Please do them as three separate sections scoring your favorite 1 and going down the list from there”.

Yes, yes you can argue there should be a sweet Loire and a white French region section and what about Switzerland and Rose in general but I can’t keep everyone happy…..One other important point it that this was asking for peoples overall wine preferences NOT a reflection on the wine C&B has in the categories etc

Reds
Burgundy, Bordeaux, Rhone, Loire, French Regional, Italy, Spain, Portugal, USA, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Argentina and Chile

Whites
Burgundy, Bordeaux, Rhone, Alsace, Loire, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, USA, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Chile

Others
Port, Madeira, Sherry, Tokaji, Sauternes, Sweet Alsace and Champagne


And now for the results……..

Reds in Order
Burgundy
Bordeaux
Italy
Rhone
Spain
Argentina
New Zealand
French Regional
Portugal
Australia
USA
Loire
Chile
South Africa

Burgundy averaged a score of 1.9 with 11 people voted it number 1. Bordeaux averaged a score of 3.1 with 4 people voting it number 1. Italy, Rhone and Spain was possibly the most competitive area and there wasn’t much between them at all, scores varied widely. From there we had the (predictably?) top two new world countries which to me were no surprise…New Zealand showing rare(?) elegance for the new World and Argentina’s brilliant “Old vine” fruit showing well. The rest indisputably produce some great wines but may be the style (Australia?) and possibly price (USA?) have an effect on their popularity. Overall pretty predictable.

Whites
Burgundy
Germany
Alsace
Loire
Rhone
New Zealand
Italy
Bordeaux
Spain
Australia
Austria
Chile
USA
South Africa

Burgundy (averaging 1.52) first the rest NOWHERE…only 6 of the 21 managed not to give Burgundy the nod here (and they all ranked it – 3,3,4,2,3,2). I suppose the dominance should not be a surprise but given there are people and some merchants too with a real fear for this category I was delighted to see this. Germany just beat Alsace by 2 points (interesting as our Alsace and German rages are quite limited, I don’t think this is or would be rare in the wine world) and then the next 5 countries were a smidge apart, from there we are into countries that really produce red but do a bit of white on the side…one common thread is that the countries more renowned for oaked wines seem to feature more lowly. Poor old South Africa again bottom…may be the test series (they are 59/6 as I write this) and the last Lions tour make for some prejudice??

Others
Champagne
Sauternes
Sherry
Port
Sweet Alsace
Tokaji
Madeira

This was always going to be the most contentious category with a certain lack of logic as some are Aperitifs and some Afterdinner and some both! Interestingly neither Sauternes or Tokaji got anyone’s vote as favourite which is especially weird given that Sauternes came second in the category. I take Madeira coming last as a personal challenge…if there is a better value drink out there then what is it?

I can’t go without a mention of the living legend that is Kauto Star…what a great run in the King George and when you combine that with Barneveld’s 9-darter at the Ally Pally last night you have sporting gold…..anyway need to keep an eye on the racing results….Menorah, Go Native and What a Friend have made it a decent punting Christmas….just need Diamond Harry to do his thing now! Have a great New Year.

and they're off......

First blog entry since the site has gone live although there are plenty of blogs from the last few months - Dinners, Tastings, Burgundy trips etc - I have been getting things ready for a while!!

It’s been a hell of a week.

Last Friday saw the release of Domaine Leflaive 2008 and the vast majority sold that day which made for quite a buzz around the office as the phones rang and the emails flew (is that the right terminology?). Fraser then did the Sloane club Rhone dinner in the evening which went well by all accounts. I won’t bore you with the weekend details other than the fact that Twist Magic winning at Sandown finally got by betting back on track.

Before I knew it Monday was on us and there was still some Domaine Leflaive business to do which was good but telling customers that many of the wines had all gone is never easy or enjoyable. There was a hint that the new website (which you will have seen if you’re reading this!) would go live over night………..but no there was a slight integration (hate that word!) niggle and another 24 hours would be needed.

Tuesday was an extraordinary day – Adam and I both manned the C&B Table at the first Royal Warrant Holders Christmas Fair which was held in the Ballroom of Buckingham Palace for 1000 members of the Royal Household and their guests. A great day meeting some fascinating people including the Queen, not something you can say everyday. Once out of the Palace, no blackberry/mobile action in there, I saw that the site was minutes from go live. The amount of work has been mind blowing from tasting notes to pricing to functionality…….

Wednesday, quick interview first thing…always like to see and stay in touch with people who write in and may be of interest in the future…after that it was looking at the selection of wines for the post Christmas Bin-end, working on a few teething issues on the web (it needs a period of “running in” so the speed should improve!) and setting the offer Calendar for next year. Exciting reports of a spectacular tasting at Clos de Tart have a started to emerge, it looked at vintages spanning an amazing 116years, I have attached these below….they reinforce what I feel, which is that the estate is a stunning terroir and now under the control of Sylvain Pitiot is going from strength to strength…very exciting times for the estate (see Burgundy Day 5 for the Clos de Tart 08's tasting notes).

http://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/a20091208.html

http://blog.cavesa.ch/index.php/2009/11/21/191523-bourgogne-passe-present-fabuleux-clos-de-tart

http://www.academiedesvinsanciens.org/index.php?archives/2131-English.html&serendipity%5Blang_selected%5D=en

With the first full day of the web done it was time for a drink!

Thursday dawned and it was time to re-focus on wines for Christmas and all the offers we have out at the moment….almost too many toys to play with. Joined the Board for a drink at lunch time, Flor de Pingus ’99 showing brilliantly and ready from now onwards, Corton-Charlemagne 2003 from Bonneau du Martray which is opulent but not too 03ish and to start (not sure why I’ve done the wines backwards) Delamotte Blanc de Blancs NV which, loyalties aside, I love.

And so to Friday….one of those frustrating start everything, finish nothing days, but given that this time in two weeks I’ll have a glass of something fizzy in my hand it can’t be too bad.



Over time I will introduce various aspects of C&B life and the characters here but we have to lead off with Darth!! Guess who got this as their Secret Santa last year?

Right time to cycle home!

Moueix Monday..........

It was a Moueix Monday this week with the great man himself, Christian, in London for our Moueix Dinner at The Groucho Club. This was an evening as much about Moueix the merchant as Moueix the owner, and lets face it when you have Petrus, Trotannoy, Magdelaine, Hosanna etc in the stable it is easy for people only to think of these very great names. Their own website explains well what they do (www.moueix.com) but essentially Moueix are Château owners (producing, marketing and distributing their own wines), Wine Merchants (buying, maturing and selling the wines of other right bank estates) and also a Negociant dealing on the Bordeaux marketplace in the futures market. Interetsingly they never get involved in whites wines, focusing purely on red (not black!!) wines.

The tasting dinner was planned to co-incide with our Christmas offering of Clarets sourced by Moueix exclusively for us. The format was a relaxed walk around tasting of the six wines below :

Lafleur Beauséjour 2005, Côtes de Castillon – Ripe but classical and drinking well now will improve for decanting.
B de Belair 2001, Saint-Emilion – The third wine of Belair St.Emilion, now re-named Belair Monange and also owned by Moueix (but wasn’t when this was made), starting to develop but not earthy, good fruit and structure, perfect now.
Haut Roc Blanquant 2002, Saint-Emilion Grand Cru – We joked that this was a super blend between Haut Brion, Roc de Cambes and Cheval Blanc (ok the Cheval bit was too ludicrous even for us) but actually it was the surprise of the night for me, glamourous, well fruited and with a kiss of oak. I am not a 2002 fan but this was very good.
L’Hospitalet de Gazin 2006, Pomerol - Second wine of Gazin and a wine I know well…..really good honest Pomerol that is versatile and very reliable (why does that sound bad ?), try it...
Capet-Guiller 2005, Saint Emilion – I hadn’t tasted this in a little while and it is a surprisingly serious wine, earthy and structured and in need of more time in my opinion, very good potential.
La Grave à Pomerol 2004 – I have always had a soft sport for the relatively easy charms of La Grave a Pomerol, soft and succulent but with lots of life left too.

A really good tasting of wines that are easy on the palate and good with food but have little pretence to profoundity.

Dinner Menu & Wines
To wash the palate and accompany the Crab Risotto we had a glass or two of Mâcon-Verzé 2007 Domaines Leflaive, still only the fourth vintage but already becoming an old friend, just starting to fatten out too, if you have 2 cases, start one!

We then moved on to two vintages of Certan Marzelle the 2003 & 2004 with slow cooked rump of lamb, mashed potato, pea purée, glazed beetroot, thyme jus. Certan Marzelle is 100% Merlot and when Moueix bought Certan Giraud (last vintage 1998) the estate was split as there were two distinct soil types, one half was made into what is now the mighty Hosanna, the other portion became Certan Marzelle. Both vintage are showing well and for those that like younger Bordeaux, starting to drink well, the style is one I like. Christian, who was on sparkling form all evening, possibly helped by the bottle of Certan Marzelle Adam and Christian shared at lunch, wanted the floor to vote on which wine they preferred. This vote went to the 2003 in a 2:1 ratio. Myself and Paul (Marus) were firmly in the 2004 camp, Adam firmly in the 2003 camp…some things never change.

Next up……Latour à Pomerol 1999 & La Fleur-Pétrus 2003 – a lovely contrast of vintages and properties. A vote would have been interesting but it was not to be. I thought the Latour a Pomerol was absolutely spot on, combining savoury nuances with sweet gamey fruit character and finished with a mineral edge. The La Fleur Petrus had a very un2003 nose, pure fruit, but to me was just not as balanced as the Latour…I think a vote may have been 50:50.

A great evening and not a mention on 2009!!