Since the early 1990’s I have been a member of the original “Ten Years On” t.asting group that was founded by the late, great Bill Baker using the reserve bottles from the original Southwold tastings. The first of these tastings that I attended was in 1992 when we looked back at the still youthful but already magnificent 1982’s We tasted further vintages at Barry Phillips’ “White Horse Inn at Chilgrove” and Bill’s “The Mill” at Hallatrow before settling on Farr Vintners as our home ground some years ago. As with the Southwold tasting, we are a group of wine writers – Jancis Robinson, Neal Martin, Steven Spurrier – and wine merchants (including the buyers of most of the major UK wine importers).
Every January for over 20 years I have spent 3 days in Southwold (a charming seaside town in East Anglia) tasting my way through hundreds of newly bottled Bordeaux wines. The “Southwold Group” was actually founded over 30 years ago by a group of wine merchants who wanted to comprehensively taste every single major Bordeaux Château wine produced in the most recently released vintage. The wines are always tasted strictly blind in peer-group flights of 12. This year it was the turn of 2008.
