Saturday, 30 January 2010
82 Cheval Blanc and vintage ratings
Tasted an 82 Cheval Blanc for the first time tonight - bottle was from very good provinence and in good condition but was pretty disappointed - on opening very lovely nose, classic delicate earthy tarry notes crushed red fruit sweet cherry and smokey tobacco but a little muted - palette was broad well balanced but a bit lean and noteably disjointed - returned to it 2 hours after decanting expecting it to have opened up but nose had noticably closed down palette was definatly more austere and acidity was now completely out of wack very suprised to see it fall over like that - was expecting much better things as not long ago had the 78 which even though from a suposedly much lesser vintage than the "legendary" 82s that was simply one of the best Bordeauxs I've ever tasted - soaring warm complex nose, hugely generous velvety texture and fabulous length really a thing of beauty - the old saying that there are no great vintages just great bottles is definitely becoming more and more apparent - generalising about vintages based on critics ratings really does seem to be a complete waste of time - a very learned colleague noted hes seeing more and more of these great 82s falling over - much like the highly rated 90s in Champagne and i've definatly seen a few of these lately that are flabby messes
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This is 'une grande tragedie', as our French cousins would say, maybe it was a dodgy bottle? I haven't experienced too many 80s classed-growth Bordeaux of late, but I did recently have an 86 Margaux, and an 86 Pichon-Lalande, and they were both fine after a couple of hours. The Margaux was still improving after about 4 hours, leaving plenty of room for extra ageing, and the P-L onl lasted a couple, but it was definitely better than when opened. There definitely sem to be no hard and fast rules. Who knows..
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