Opinions about wine and Château La Croix du Lys red 2014

We drank half a bottle of this wine with some some shoulder  of roast lamb the other night and polished off the rest of the bottle the following evening with some lamb cawl.  I rather enjoyed the  Château La Croix du Lys red 2014. It was full of plum fruit and blackcurrant flavour. It was quite complex and of full body. The tannin was already quite well integrated. It went down well with the lamb and the taste remained on the palate for quite a long time after swallowing. It had all the hallmarks of good standard Bordeaux and it was good value for money. It would probably improve in the bottle for a couple of years longer.

I looked up the wine on on some websites and the opinion of this wine varied especially on this site.

https://www.vivino.com/wineries/croix-du-lys/wines/bordeaux-2011

For starters the website gets the origin of the wine wrong. Château La Croix du Lys originates in the Blaye region of Bordeaux: the wine is AOC Blaye Côtes de Bordeaux and not Entre-deuxs-Mers.

One drinker rated the wine as disappointing and not interesting. Another rated, the wine more highly, with notes of wood flavour -presumably oak- an elegant wine which was fine and lightly spiced. These are indeed very different opinions. One of the drinkers awarded it 5 out of 5 stars without giving a verbal opinion.

Who is right and who is wrong? Who can tell? Some tasters may be more sensitive to some flavours than others. Some may just be prejudiced. Some may be expecting something better or worse than what they actually tasted. Some maybe looking at the label and then making a judgement. My bottle of Château La Croix du Lys 2014 did not set an expectation on the label as there was no description of the wine. You have to make your own judgement as far as the producer, Simon Rey et Fils, is concerned.

You can learn about the features of wine which give you a clue about the quality of the wine and its potential to improve with ageing. You can learn to spot when a wine is corked, but even then some people are oblivious to the cork taint produced by a combination of a miscreant fungus and the antibiotic used to treat it. Even if you cannot taste cork taint then the affected wine will have lost its fruit character. Some Masters of Wine are unable to sniff out a cork taint but they should be able to recognise that the wine has lost a lot of its quality when affected by 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole (TCA) cork taint. Top wines are not immune to cork taint, no matter what they cost, as most top wines will be sealed with a cork.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_taint

A top quality wine may simply be not to your taste; before buying a case of an expensive wine you should taste it. If you are a wine investor you should do the same to ensure that your wine has got the ageing potential to increase in value over many years. Whether you drink your wine or invest in wine you should learn to trust your own judgement. Why not do a wine course?

https://www.wsetglobal.com/