Bonjour,
Je recopie ici une partie de post d'un autre sujet >
Une partie du message du 29 mars du blog de J.Suckling qui relativise les quelques 95-100 qu'il a distribue a quelques tres grands et tres chers Rive Gauche :
"I keep hearing wine producers in Bordeaux using the word “great” or “classic” for 2006, and I just can’t understand it. Maybe one could say that his or her 2006 was a great wine or that it was classic in style. But 2006 is not a great vintage. I am sorry.
Can’t we just agree that 2006 was a good year when some outstanding, even a few exceptional wines, were made?
The 2006 vintage just couldn’t be great. The growing season wasn’t great. The harvest wasn’t great. The only thing that was great was the work some châteaus did in their vineyards and the winemaking they did in their cellars. And that’s how they made some very good to outstanding wines. Some made exceptional quality wines, especially those châteaus with top-quality vineyards.
For example, I tasted the 2006 La Mission Haut-Brion today and it is one of the wines of the vintage. It is rich and powerful yet refined and beautiful (...)better than the Haut-Brion. (...)
But La Mission is certainly the exception in 2006. Most barrel samples I tasted are nowhere near the same level of quality as the La Mission, or Latour, Margaux, Mouton, and Las Cases.
“I am not surprised by the differences you found,” said Jean-Philippe Mascles, cellar master at Haut-Brion and La Mission, during a tasting with him today. I told him how uneven the vintage was. “It is normal. You had excesses during the year. It was sort of bizarre. You had a very hot and dry July. Then it was very cold for August. I remember wearing a sweater. Then it rained too but it rained lightly and consistently. Then September we had rain. Only producers with great vineyards who worked seriously made serious wines … it wasn’t a great year.”
YES. A great year is like 2005, when nearly everyone from the simple winery in some outback district of Bordeaux to the first-growth in Pauillac makes the wines of their career (...)
I have tasted about 150 2006s so far, and the majority of the wines are good to very good but nothing special. I would say most would fall in the 84- to 87-point range, if I had to give them exact scores. Remember, I am not talking about any of the big names. I have tasted lots of bourgeois crus and petit château already. They are clean wines with good, but not opulent fruit, with firm tannins and medium length. Most lack some concentration in their midpalates and have slightly austere tannins.
Nearly every winemaker in Bordeaux has told me that this was a “vine grower’s vintage” but I might add that it was also a “winemaker’s vintage.” Those who excelled in both areas made the best wines of the vintage.
The fact is that very few wineries in Bordeaux had the financial resources to have done the necessary work in their vineyards and cellars to make excellent wines in 2006—primarily the very top names (...)
“We have so much competition in the world now that we have to make outstanding wines even in a difficult vintage such as 2006,” said Hubert de Boüard, the winemaker and part owner of St.-Emilion’s Angélus as well as the proprietor of La Fleur de Boüard in Lalande de Pomerol. His Angélus is outstanding in 2006.
Hubert was saying that this year the en primeur, or futures campaign would mostly focus on 30 or 40 names. It is not a year to buy across the board, like in 2005. I am not sure I would personally buy much 2006 en primeur, but I can see that some might want to. The top names of Bordeaux are getting harder and harder to buy, particularly some of the cult wines and other limited-production wines. Basically, the wines to focus on are those with score ranges of 95–100 or 92–94 in my ratings.
I am talking about consumers, by the way. Wine merchants are going to have to buy anyway to protect their allocations of futures. The system works that way, (...) If they pass on buying in one year, especially less good ones, then they won’t get much in another. I know a number of U.S. wine merchants who didn’t buy many 2004 futures, so they had a limited number of 2005 to buy, and later sell (...)
I haven’t finished tasting yet. So these are just my impressions at the moment. I have to taste the big names of St.-Emilion and Pomerol—Cheval-Blanc, Ausone, Pétrus, and Le Pin—and I suspect they made some excellent wines. But they are, as always, the cream on top of the milk. But the milk in 2006 is looking rather skim at the moment ...
I keep thinking about conversations over the week when wine producers looked me straight in the eye and said how 2006 was a great year. Some even said that 2006 was better than 2005. And some even said it didn’t rain during the harvest! That’s not helpfuI ... I was in Bordeaux during the harvest.
Moreover, the wines tell the story ".
Cordialement,
dfried