There is an immense variety of Bordeaux wine, so, to try to find a wine which could be the representation of the intimate DNA of Bordeaux wine could be judged as a risky exercise. It is just a game, an intellectual game, to name one wine as being representative of what Bordeaux wine is. Some people could say that it is nonsense.
But it is just a game. If I had been asked before last week, I would have named Haut-Bailly. And, to try to find also an optimal maturity, I would have said Haut-Bailly. But during the two crazy days in Bochum with an overdose of canonic wines, I had drunk two wines which led me to think of what the archetypal Bordeaux could be.
I drank Vieux Chateau Certan which was of an amazing perfection. This wine was considered by many of my friends as a points wine. But this wine had in hand the flag of Pomerol, more than the flag of Bordeaux. And I drank a Pontet-Canet. This wine cannot pretend to be a points wine. This would be inappropriate. But it had a balance, an elegance, a sense for proportions which struck me.
And I went further : this age for this wine is the optimal form of maturity. This does not mean that this wine is the best. It means that it represents a sane image of the archetypal Bordeaux. But at one moment, I had this encounter, and I thought that a definition of Bordeaux in a dictionary of taste would be Pontet-Canet. Have you ever had once, this sensation of finding that a Bordeaux wine was fully corresponding to what a Bordeaux should be?
I was actually thinking about this question last night when I happened to stumble across a Cellartracker tasting note from Keith Levenberg on a Ch. It seems when I have had these epiphanies that I am now drinking a classic claret, it has been from Bordeaux from either less-heralded vintages or less-heralded estates.
