“Life is short, we do not waste our time on bland indifferent wines; we would rather share half a bottle of something with character and quality than drink six bottles of plonk.”  

– Michael Broadbent, Vintage Wine (2002) 

I do not begrudge anyone drinking Bordeaux in its flush of youth. It is a free world. I am guilty of infanticide myself. Winemaking techniques have been modified over the last two decades, with claret reconfigured to be more malleable, more approachable from its opening pages. It is a bit like parents mashing up their kids’ food. Good things go to those who cannot wait.

Nowadays, claret kowtows to aficionados with shortened drinking horizons because the bottom line is: money talks. A lost sale simply because a wine mandates an extended period in bottle has become an anathema in contemporary winemaking. Expediency is all the rage.

But I would like to say this… 

It is like buying a Ferrari 250GTO and never driving above 30mph.  

Like sailing a yacht around a harbour and ignoring the open sea. 

Like watching a football match to look at the linesmen.  

Subscribing to Vinous to look at the pictures.   

The joy of opening a bottle of fine wine allowed to live beyond childhood is one of life’s small pleasures. What constitutes adulthood is temporally nebulous. It varies between region, producer, vintage and personal predilection. For ease of purpose, let us define it as the point when secondary aromas and flavours overlay primary. It is that liminal moment when the DNA of terroir shapes the wine instead of winemaking and, in doing so, begins to reveal its true personality. Sure, it is a gamble. A bottle can fall short of expectations, let alone the twin ogres of cork taint or premature oxidation. But at least the wine had a chance to prove its mettle.

The clamour for instant gratification and unwillingness to wait for drinking windows to open means that, in my opinion, oenophiles are beginning to lose their appreciation of mature wine. Tastebuds are no longer attuned to aged claret. Without wishing to disrespect one of my favourite actors, it is like Leonardo di Caprio’s penchant for exchanging girlfriends once they reach a certain age. If I met him, which is unlikely down Guildford High Street, I would ask whether his love life gets repetitive or boring. Isn’t the attraction of a partner a mutual sharing of life’s experiences? Personally, I have never lost the thrill of imbibing history enclosed in glass and cork. It impels the drinker to ponder its year of birth within the context of concurrent personal and historical events and thereby lends a new dimension to its cerebral gratification. Someone should write a book about that, and The Complete Bordeaux Vintage Guide is still available in all good bookshops etc., etc. 

Restaurant lists were once havens for mature bottles. However, even the most revered lists are now veritable kindergartens. They cater to a similar age range, don’t they? On rare occasions that mature wines are priced without egregious mark-ups, the wines vanish before the ink has dried, which must be why sommeliers now hand over an iPad instead of a leather-bound tome so large that it has its own gravitational pull. The irony is that these older bottles can work out to be cheaper than the newest releases. These upside-down economics are what currently leaves en primeur pondering its fate after spring. I cannot remember the last time I saw a list of mature Bordeaux apart from La Tour d’Argent in Paris, where you must suffer the pressed duck for the privilege. There are some outposts that strive to list mature wines, such as Noble Rot in London, Bern’s in Tampa, Beaugravières in the Rhône and whatever you keep secret because, hey, mum’s the word when you do stumble upon them.  

This article is my little ode to mature Bordeaux, the oldest vintage 1870. Despite the cavalcade of articles on Vinous, they cannot cater for every single wine on first-name terms with my palate. So here, ad hoc notes are corralled together with several mini-verticals over previous months as some are getting a bit old. As well as a salutary reminder of the joys of mature wine, this article provides information for those that cellar bottles and wish to know how they should be served. These notes fill in gaps or expand the Vinous database that, partial as I am, is currently the best single resource for vintage claret.

I cannot deny pangs of guilt, the immorality of dumping wines in blasé fashion, wines that many dream about. It is a star-studded cast, for example, 1908 Yquem, 1921 Cheval Blanc, 1945 Petrus, 1959 Mouton Rothschild, 1983 Lafleur, and so on. 

“You stand accused of drinking legendary clarets,” the judge inside my fertile imagination bellows. “How do you plead?” 

“Guilty as sin, your honour,” I reply from the dock. “But if you were in my position and these wines were served by generous friends for the simple pleasure of sharing, what would you do? A greater sin would be to refuse them on the grounds of being unworthy.” 

“Fair point,” the judge would reply. “Could you give me the contact number for your friends?”  

The wine was so-so.  

No exclamations of greatness.  

No choirs of angels.  

More fool us for waiting until the wine was 102 years old. We moved on to others that included 1923 Haut-Brion and 1926 Latour. As proceedings began to wind down with a heavenly 1921 Yquem, two of our party returned to our half-drunk glasses of ’21 Cheval…Talk about transfiguration! It had silently evolved into an ethereal elixir that prompted fellow guests to rue guzzling their own glasses. Interestingly, the same Phoenix-like resurrection happened with the 1947 Cheval Blanc a year later, to an even greater degree—readers will see this written up in the future.  

These were timely reminders how even century-old bottles need careful handling. How they defy logic, how a moribund wine can undergo a Lazarus-like resurrection in the glass. I often read advice about pouring wines of antiquity without decanting, affording them little or no aeration. That is very occasionally true with respect to weaker vintages. However, in my experience, a majority require time after opening to settle. They need to find their groove. If you’ve been in prison for decades, then on the day of release, as the prison doors clang shut behind you, you need time to adjust, lest you end up like poor old Brooks after Shawshank. They reward patience by blossoming in the glass. Even experienced sommeliers recommend immediate pouring, partly because compared to 20 years ago, they are precluded experience serving such wines and gaining first-hand knowledge, aside from the fact that blame will lie on their shoulders if a customer complains that aeration ruined their valuable bottle. Too much money is at stake. So, I empathise choosing to play it safe. But you can bet your bottom dollar that a lot of wine is wasted on rash decisions made on first impressions. Remember, wine does not have a voice to say that it just needs a bit of a breather.  

Another topic I want to discuss is contentious: reconditioning. Bottles have been reconditioned since time immemorial, traditionally by merchants who were dab hands at the practice, nowadays undertaken at châteaux. Angels take their share, so topping up is necessarily, whilst natural corks have a shelf life of around 25 to 30 years. I understand that bottles need to be maintained and preserved. But here is the rub… 

Most bottles lose something when reconditioned, even when it is done with utmost care at the estate. I wish it were not true, but old bottles are precious and fragile. I can only offer empirical evidence from 28 years of tasting mature bottles. If the cork is sound and (crucially) the wine is clear, then even if it has a low fill, do not recondition the bottle. Leave it as it is.  

Something else I want to get off my chest.  

Do not diss half-bottles!  

Half-bottles are great. They are your friend.  

“Oh, the wine doesn’t age as well in half-bottle,” I hear by rote, not least from winemakers, many of whom no longer produce them. That is simply not borne out in the half-bottles that I have drunk. At Mr. Koala’s fantastic Bordeaux dinner in Hong Kong, the two 375ml bottles of 1949 La Mission Haut-Brion were divine. In fact, it is rare that I regret opening a half bottle and think it would have been so much better in regular bottle size or larger. The only downside, admittedly a big one, is that if the wine is as splendid as that ’49, then it is gone too soon.  

Also, you will notice a small armada from Pomerol. These originate from my namesake book that each year I resolve and fail to rewrite. Some of the notes might be a bit long in the tooth, but in all cases, they update incumbent notes, plus many are rare to the point that some represent the last bottle in existence. These focus on comprehensive, nigh unrepeatable verticals of Le Croix de Gay, La Fleur-Pétrus, Trotanoy and elusive early vintages of Le Pin, including the virtually non-existent 1979 that Jacques Thienpont once described as his “trial wine,” when production was around 200 cases. 

I began with a quote from Michael Broadbent, so I will finish with one.

“Claret works on many levels, appealing to both the intellect and the senses. What more can one want?” 

Quite.