Drink your-self a vertical

There are not many luxury items that people share as freely as fine wine. When a guy pulls up to a bar in a brand new Lotus and you say, "Wow what a car, I've always wondered what it's like to drive one of those," never does he throw you the keys and say, "go ahead, try it."  However, when you say to a wine drinker, "Is that a Jeroboam of '45 Mouton? How wonderful must that be?"  most true lovers of wine will ask the bartender for an additional glass, pour you a small taste, and send it over. Loving wine inspires a certain benevolence because the enjoyment of fine wine is simply enhanced by sharing it with people who appreciate it.

Pichon and Helmet are wine lovers/collectors. Pichon has a deep collection he has put together over some time that he has rounded out by cherry-picking his father's cellar, which is set up in much the same way. It is great and shows that methodical collecting over time leaves you with some delights as time passes. Helmet is a young, big-game hunter. He has tasted a lot of wine and has great exposure to some of the most respected wines in the world. He has a concept of value for those bottles considered to be great and it is fun to watch him stalking all over the web, sighting up wines in his range, and taking them down.

One night, while out with these two, they mentioned what a great idea it would be to put together an assortment of the different vintage Latours they each have and do a vertical tasting. When they said that it would be fun if I joined guess what I said?

The beauty of a vertical tasting, of any wine, is that you can get an appreciation for how vintage affects the final product.  Ideally, each house is using the same fruit from the same place and making wine with the same ideals in mind, so the variations from year to year will be the result of weather. If you want to take your connoisseurship to the level where you discuss good vintage vs. bad, a vertical is the best way to examine these differences.

So we all met at Pichon's house. Pichon was providing an '86, '90, and '93. Helmet brought a '64 and a '98. Pichon Sr. decided to join and brought a magnum of '89. We tasted, standing around the kitchen counter, and kept the food we intended to eat after tasting out of the way.  We tasted the Latours in the order they are listed below.

1998 had a deep garnet color and bruléed sugar, raspberries, lilac, white pebbles, blueberries, chocolate and anise on the nose. It had great focus with very up-front tannins; very juicy.

1993 was garnet with a brackish hue around the rim. The nose was green bell peppers, red fruit, minerals and cinnamon. The palate was green and very thin in the middle.

1989 (out of magnum) the color was a mature garnet. There was decomposing meat and red fruit on the nose and the palate was flattish and hollow in the middle. (Read on for notes on the evolution of this wine).

1990 was a light garnet color with cinnamon, leather, dry-aged beef, and macerated fruit on the nose. The palate was very well structured with a solid backbone. It was quite complex and was consistent from attack to finish.

1986 God, we did not want this wine to be corked. We smelled around it and claimed spice, dry herbs and wood. We called it funky and let it sit, hoping it would blow off but, alas, this wine was corked, just slightly, enough to let you know that it probably could have been a great wine if the Bordelaise would accept responsibility for quality control and test their corks for TCA.

1964 The conditions of this wine's storage were suspicious from the get go. The ullage was high shoulder and the label was very discolored, so we were not surprised that it was shot. It was totally maderized and smelled of blood, iron, sourdough and Port.

I think the '90 was the big winner. The fascinating thing about a vertical tasting is that we never would have thought to call the '89's mid-palate hollow until we tasted it in a flight of it's siblings.

Then the real hedonism got underway. With the tasting officially finished, we left the remains of the bottles to give them a chance to open up and went to the dining room table with our tasting glasses to sit, and drink, and eat.

Because tasting never really gets going until after a little wine has been consumed, I had brought and an '01 Marcassin Three Sisters to be used as a warm-up. Helen Turley may make America's best white wines, so I figured it would be a fair starter for such an amazing line-up. The wine had started all lemon, toast and minerals with amazing focus. Coming back to the half glass I saved a few hours later, it had become hazelnuts. It was so rich and great and it served again to refresh for what was coming next.

For the second round, we added a '70 Cos d'Estournel and an '82 Pichon Lalande, figuring that the Latours wanted some time to evolve. They were fantastic. The Pichon was blueberries and leather, with a huge attack that tapered away through the mid-palette and finished forever.  The Cos was detritus and blackberries, not as huge as the other wines of the night but solid and good.

We also added a plate of sliced prosciutto, three dried sausages, and four cheeses. The first of the cheeses was an Affidélice, a pungent cows milk cheese that has had its rind washed with Chablis. It was very stinky and the runny paste was amazing. It was everyone's favorite. Tete de Moine from Switzerland, an intense, semi-hard cows milk cheese, was second.  Third was Fourme d'Ambert, a semi-soft blue that is great in taste without getting overly blue-y on the wines. Fourth, in the starring role, was a real Camembert. God, there is nothing like Camembert and Bordeaux. The most ridiculous thing in the world is that that cheese is illegal in this country.

With some time for them to open up and some food to put with them, we went back to the Latours and the biggest notable change was that the '89 it had found it's balance and was all kirsch liqueur goodness. The '86 was still corked, the '93 was still really just flat, the '98 had not changed much, and the '90 was still the most noteworthy sample.

That the '98 didn't really go anywhere is an interesting conundrum because that is the exact opposite of how Bordeaux should act. After 3 hours in an open glass, wine (Bordeaux especially) should either evolve or decompose, it should not still taste like it did when opened. I am suspicious that there has been some manipulation by the winemakers here to give it a certain flavor to appeal to a certain palate, forgoing the fundamentals of the French ideal of terroir. Only time and verticals will tell.