Today the Farr Vintners tasting team assembled at Gatwick Airport for our annual trip to Bordeaux to taste the latest en primeur vintage. This year it's the turn of 2011 and after 2 monumental vintages - 2009 and 2010 - we have the feeling that this is going to be a hard one to get excited about.
Last week Farr Vintners hosted a blind tasting match against 6 members of the Oxford Blind Tasting Society, led by captain and President James Flewellen. It was a chance for the Farr team to show their skills learnt in the trade, and compete against a team who blind taste several wines multiple times a week. This being a home fixture, with Stephen Browett choosing the wines for us to taste, the pressure was on to show how we would match up to the experienced Oxford tasters.
Chardonnay Vines on Hunting Hill On the press This week was the start of the Chardonnay harvest that will see grapes for all the Kumeu River labels picked, pressed and put into barrels ready for fermentation. I spent the start of the week working with Nigel Tibbits (cellar master here for 37 years), helping him to load and clean the two presses. As grapes enter the winery, they are forklifted into the metal cylindrical press which is lined with a bag and has sieves along the outside for the juice to pass through. Once full, air is forced inside, squeezing the bag.
Ben Browett with Pinot Noir stalks Following my stint at Château Latour working on the 2011 harvest (and then a few months working as a sommelier at Chez Bruce), I headed off “down under” for the 2012 harvest in New Zealand. First stop is Auckland, where I am working at the prestigious Kumeu River Winery, widely regarded as New Zealand’s finest Chardonnay producer.
Robert Parker The wine world has been waiting for uber-critic Robert Parker to reveal his judgement and scores for the 2009 Bordeaux vintage now that he has tasted all the finished wines from bottle for the first time. To say that he is ecstatic about this vintage would be somewhat of an under-statement! He describes it as “Unquestionably the greatest Bordeaux vintage I have ever tasted.” He praises the classed growths (and gives them enormous scores) but he also declares that the quality is fantastic across the board – at cru bourgeois level and even petit vins and generic Bordeaux. He concludes that 2009 is the finest vintage since 1982 (therefore surpassing 1989, 1990, 2000 and 2005) but believes that the standards of winemaking are much higher than they were in 1982 and that therefore the wines are significantly better. This is, as he says, “1982 but greater”.
