Old Bordeaux Tasting

We pooled our $50 payments to buy some nice older Bordeaux wines for a tasting. 12 of us paid $600 in total, which was enough for some bread, cheese, sausage, and bottles of 1975 Leoville Las Cases ($175; 92/88 points), 1979 Pichon Lalande ($125; 93 pts), 1989 Brane Cantenac ($100; 94/95 points); 1979 Chasse Spleen ($60; 89 points); and 1983 Chasse Spleen ($60; 90/91 points). We drank the wines in reverse order of my list. To preserve any ephemeral bouquets, I decanted the wines off the sediment and rinsed out the bottle, then refilled immediately with the decanted wine, about an hour before the event.

We poured about 1.5 oz for each taste, going through all the wines. Then there was enough wine remaining that we could go through the wines again. It turns out that the second pass of each wine revealed important changes as the wines opened up. Each wine easily added 10 points to its score, by being given time to open up.

The winners were the three most-expensive wines. Upon opening up, they were distinct in their own way and wonderful. Each had picked up some body and lots of complexity compared to its initial tasting. They are not like the lush, fruit-forward wines of Walla Walla, which so many of us here in Portland love--they are French, so you get a more-austere, lean, complex experience. We enjoyed unmistakable notes of chocolate, funky barnyard, creme de cassis, purple fruits, menthol. What a fun time!

Bottom line: When you drink fine Bordeaux, don't drink it all up until you've given the wine a half hour, an hour, two hours--as much as it needs--to fully open and strut its stuff.