We had this last night, and very good it was. Nice and light at 12.5% too. I’ve never seen a Mâcon Nouveau before spotting this in the little supermarket in Chantilly just before Christmas.
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The latest vintage, 2022, of Adi Badenhorst’s Secateurs Chenin Blanc. The quality of the wine for the price is just phenomenal
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selection ready for this evening, do this now as later photos won’t make much sense!
to commence
Bollinger La Grande Annee 2008
for the Main course - Beef Wellington
Chateau Cos d’Estournel 1995, decant around 5pm
Cheese course into the evening
Taylors 10yr Old tawny, slighty chilled
Midnight
Hambledon Classic Cuvee
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Any thoughts welcomed on these wines.
The 1961 is especially likely to be corked as it has not been well stored.
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I don’t recognise most of the wines, but my gut feels would be (with the caveat that wines can really surprise you with their longevity, so nothing lost by popping the corks):
The ‘61, a great vintage, but I’d be amazed if anything but the top growths still had any fruit left, so the odds are it’s pretty undrinkable by now.
‘97 was an attractive early-drinking vintage, I’d be surprised if a minor Graves Château was in good shape now, but I’ve had a few ‘97s which surprised me.
‘06 was a tannic vintage which took time to come round, the Listrac might be pretty good now (I have a 2006 Margaux going at the moment and it’s tannic but very enjoyable), it is possible the tannin will dominate the fruit, but if you like tannic wines my guess will be it’ll be lovely.
I don’t know the Chianti but 2010 was a very good vintage and that could well be lovely.
A quick Google tells me that your 2015 is made by Borie-Manoux, a very good merchant house (who own a couple of my favourite Châteaux) great vintage, should be really nice now.
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It isn’t one of the heavyweights, but GC is always tasty, and 2007 was a good vintage. Should be nice.
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I do like a glass of fizz, but find many Champagnes a bit sharp, can’t abide Prosecco unless it’s a really good one, which is hard to find in the U.K. and rather like the various French cremants. Of the English sparklers I’ve tried, this is my favourite. A glass now while cooking, stopper it up and a glass at midnight. It’s not cheap but it’s New Year’s Eve after all.
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Happy New Year Nigel, also my favourite English sparkler.
And a very happy and healthy 2024 to you too, Eoin.
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Cantenac Brown 2006
Given 2 hours in decanter, still ruby with a bit of thinning at the rim. Started drinking at half 5 to celebrate a year of no hospitalisation.
Firm nose of cassis, dark red fruits and firm cedar and tobacco. (I used the word firm twice because it’s quite unyielding at this point.) The palate reflects the nose, good acidity, very very grippy tannins, but fantastic palate filled with dark red fruits of blackcurrant and another sweet dark red fruit I can’t quite place, along with tobacco, and then a lovely blackberry (!) perfume. After about 2-3 hours the tannins softened, the nose is now creamy with sweet cassis and red fruits, raspberry and strawberry. The palate again has softened, still good acidity but the tannins are now firm but in balance, the fruit has cassis, strawberry, raspberry, there is a creaminess and some lovely cedar, and a fantastic sweet perfume of strawberry and raspberry. There wasn’t a gradual evolution that I noticed, it just seems to switch. The early drinking was a tight tannin led claret as you’d expect from this vintage with enough fruit and complexity to make it enjoyable, then it suddenly opened into a well structured wine with a fantastic balance between forwardness and grippy tannin. It’s been open 7 hours and I’ve been drinking for 5, a fascinating and lovely wine in both closed and open incarnations. (I should have enough left to raise a small glass at midnight.)
It’s a fairly recent purchase, released from the château in early 2022.
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That looks very inviting. Enjoy 
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Cheers Pete, look forward to sharing a bottle or two when you next head North.
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In the end, four of us managed to drink it, just.
Terroir, Tannins and stones, with a trace of vinegar.
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Shame, that and the Chianti would have been my best hopes.
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What Eoin said, exactly.
As an aside: ‘corked’ is not a consequence of time under cork, but a specific chemical ( 2,4,6-trichloroanisole or TCA) taint which the wine acquires through contact with a naturally occurring mould in the bark of the tree from which the cork is cut. (Technically - as the cork industry is very keen to point out - it can come from any wood with which the wine has been in contact, and indeed affected barrels are occasionally discarded/treated, but such wines should not reach the bottling line.)
A wine is, or hopefully isn’t, corked the moment the cork goes in (after a few days anyway). And it stays that way.
The TCA smell is of mouldy cardboard, and it gets worse with oxygen (ie once opened). The dank smell that really very old wine can acquire through transpiration is similar smelling (actually likely another type of anisole), but different in that it can dissipate once the bottle is opened, and does not suppress the fruit aromas/flavours.
TCA is one of the most pernicious aroma compounds known to man. Human beings can detect it at concentrations as low as 1-3 PPT. Parts per trillion is difficult to measure (1 PPT is 1 second in 320 centuries, one drop in an Olympic swimming pool - pretty much homeopathic!!). Everyone can smell TCA at around 30 PPT.
At lowest concentrations it simply dulls the fruit and makes the wine seem flat and boring. At higher levels the wet cardboard smell is unmistakable. But something ’corked’ to one person may not appear so to another.
Good news is that it’s harmless, and has quite a low boiling point, meaning that you can use affected wine for cooking, and the smell will disappear. (Alas, pasteurisation is not a cure for cork taint as it ruins the wine in different ways.)
However, all corks have a lifespan, eventually losing their elasticity, thereby making a less perfect seal, and allowing too much oxygen (and possibly worse) in. Eventually they may dry out and crumble completely.
The best wines use not just the best, but also the longest, corks for this reason, but when a wine gets to about 50, it’s probably time either to drink it, or have it (professionally) recorked, (which the original château will usually do - for a price, but including topping up if the level has gone down too much.)
Your 1961, for the reasons Eoin gave above, is unlikely still to be delicious and may well taste stale, but if it is (also) corked that would be coincidental bad luck!
At risk of boring you all to death, there have been some very positive developments.
About 30 years ago it was estimated that about one in ten bottles of wine was TCA affected.
What industry tolerates a failure rate of 10% when there are valid alternative solutions?
The first solution was the plastic cork (not really a fan, me. Hard to get out - and even harder to get back in, should you want to. Plastic simply does not have the enduring elasticity of natural cork).
Then, screw caps, whose only ‘problem’ as a closure for wine, is . . . image. Any wine destined to be consumed within about three years would be better for using screw cap. The only thing to be gained from cork is that after more time than this the natural transpiration of the oxygen, both within and externally to, the cork, will allow the wine gently to oxidise without risk of bacterial or other spoilage. (Some modern screwcaps can also do this in fact). It’s for the same reason that such a wine will benefit from decanting, swirling in the glass, and opening ahead of time. But none of this applies to pretty much all rosé, and most whites, especially those that have not seen oak in their production. These suffer, rather than benefit, from oxidation. And many reds, particularly those low in tannin and designed or destined to be drunk in youth.
However screw caps do have an image problem (ranging from none in New Zealand, almost none in Australia and Scandinavia up to practically no acceptance (yet) in the States and France. UK probably about a 7 on that 0-10 scale.)
The cork industry (almost all the world’s cork is grown in Portugal) was, it is fair to say, in some kind of denial about all this at first, invoking a PR campaign which even managed to drag in the now King with all manner of not-especially relevant comments about endangered wildlife should the cork forests be lost. (Possibly true, but just because their bark becomes less valuable does not mean they have to be felled. And cork has myriad other uses.)
Eventually they acknowledged the problem and now the sterilisation is less batch-led (remember one part per trillion is enough, so, as soon as a tank of cleaning water was contaminated, so then would everything that came into contact with it subsequently.)
The incidence pf TCA contamination in wine has now gone down to around 2-3%. The only affected corks are those where the mould was actually growing in that precise place in the bark in the first place and not simply because the cork has been in a over-used vat of boiling water with bleach in).
Talking of which, the ‘chloro’ in TCA is a legacy of - you guessed it - chlorine, and if the corks are sterilised with Ozone rather than bleach (much more expensive, as anyone who has switched a swimming pool from chlorine to ozone can attest) TCA cannot develop, even if the mould is there.
The main people sterilising with ozone are a company called DIAM, and they guarantee that their corks are TCA-free. Their process of necessity involves grinding the cork, so they are composite, and all carry their logo.
Some top California producers sometimes soak test - each cork is placed in a saucer of water overnight and then a person smells the water in the morning, discarding any affected corks. This costs about a buck per cork a which is a price worth paying for a wine that may sell for $100 or more.
It is not only wine that gets contaminated with TCA (it is not only cork-oak where the mould exists). Bananas, and root vegetables (carrots especially) seem susceptible to the taint, especially if pre-prepared (i.e. sold in a plastic bags, or as part of a mixture). As before, though, harmless and not likely to survive cooking.
That was a long answer to a question you never asked, apologies!!
But it took my mind off my mild hangover. For any chemists, apologies also for some generalisations above, of which I am aware, but I didn’t come here to offer a cure for narcolepsy…
Happy New Year!
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Thanks Rod - great post!
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Sorry, I only just saw this, had a day off internet yesterday…!
Afraid we have not lived in the UK since 2007.
I imagine that The Wine Society continues to be the best, and is a fine institution, definitely worth being part of.
I would tread more warily with the others, especially those offering ‘too-good-to-be-true discounts. If something is cheap it is usually cheap for a reason other than altruism. The producers of the best (value) anything do, or should, not normally need to discount their wares.
Make friends with your local independent wine merchant for the best advice and greatest selection of interesting things, and monitor the supermarkets for the best bargains (they have huge buying power but also very large minimum supply quantities, so rarely get the really interesting wines, as such are (generally) only produced in small quantities).
Happy New Year!
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