Les Forts de Latour is the second wine of the famous Château Latour Paulliac. 1989 was a good year in Bordeaux but I was not certain that this wine was going to age well any longer.
I decanted the wine just before some guests arrived to eat roast beef with us. There was plenty of sediment left at the bottom of the bottle and I sampled a glass of the dregs to make sure that the wine was OK. If you swallow a little bit of sediment it does you no harm.
The wine was past its best and was on the downward slope but if you want to buy a bottle now it will cost you around £100. We had bought the wine for considerably less years ago.
The wine had turned a Burgundy colour owing to the age. It smelt perfectly clean with aromas of vanilla and oak on the nose and dried fruits rather than fresh fruits. It was more like stewed prunes than plums.
On the palate it had medium acidity and the tannins where were very light. It was now medium body but I suspect that in 1992 it would have had a fuller body. It tasted very much as it smelt with the typical tobacco box flavour of Bordeaux and the oak taste of vanilla was still there. There was very little fresh fruit flavour and there were vegetal flavours just like aged Burgundy. It was very concentrated but it had probably lost some complexity. It tasted very warm on the palate which in my view is a mark of a wine which has aged well. it was not however hot as all the components of the wine were well integrated. It had a very long length. All in all it had aged well and was of very good quality. Most wine would have gone rotten after 25 years.
I suspect now that buyers are prepared to pay lots of money for this wine because of the label. If you have got some of this wine then I suggest that you drink it if you are not interested in money, as it is on the way down.
I was interested in the reaction of our guests when they tasted it . I told everyone what wine it was. My wife and one of our female friends were very impressed. I could tell from the faces from my other guests that they were less enthusiastic. I think that we have all got used to drinking wines at a younger age and we are used to strong fruit flavours and even wine enthusiasts get a bit of a shock when they taste ageing fruit flavours rather than fresh ones.
I think I got a genuine reaction from my wife and friends uninfluenced by the label, the reputation or the price or my suggestion and this is what wine appreciation should really be about.
http://www.wine-searcher.com/find/les+forts+de+latour/1989
No comments:
Post a Comment