Friday — March 12, 2004

All about wine
By KEVIN QUINN

2000 Bordeaux:
To buy or not to buy?

---

Sometimes a great vintage comes along and you think the prices are too high. You buy a little, only a little. You feel you have to show those fellows you’re not going to support their greed. Five years down the road you find you’re kicking yourself and cursing your frugality. If only I’d bought more! 1982 Bordeaux, 1985 Burgundy, 1994 California Cabernet, 1997 Brunello, the ghosts of these vintages inhabit my nightmares. I can hear the Ghost of Christmas Present whispering to me, "Buy 2000 Bordeaux before it’s all gone!"

I wake up screaming, "But Tiny Tim doesn’t even like wine!"

By French law (Appellation Controlee) the best red wines of the Bordeaux region, specifically Haut Medoc, can only be made from five red grape varieties: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec, Petit Verdot and Cabernet Franc. Combined with their unique "terrior"—the French term for site-specific characteristics of a wine—the 2000 bottlings show an incredible range of flavors. The best wines of the vintage show rich opulent, almost California-like fruit, with big bold tannins that are remarkably well balanced.

The normally less aspiring "cru bourgeois" and "petits châteaux" wines show a wonderful restrained elegance, with ripe fruit and silky tannins. It’s foolish to blanket a single vintage with these comments, but the quality in 2000 is more singularly universal than any other vintage that I’ve experienced in Bordeaux.

The great thing is there still is some 2000 Bordeaux in the market. Those that are on the shelves now may have been purchased when the dollar and the euro were close to a one-to-one swap. Now $130 is equal to about 100 euros and new releases from France are expected to be 25 percent to 30 percent higher than a year ago.

The true values in 2000 Bordeaux may lie in the "cru bourgeois" and the "petits châteaux" wines. With such Napa Valley benchmark Cabernet Sauvignons as Beaulieu Vineyards Rutherford and Mondavi Napa only now falling back from $25 - $30 retail prices, these $15 - $25 values offer great drinking over the next three years or so.

Classified Growths—those rated in the extensive evaluation of Bordeaux wines in 1855—in the left bank communes of Pauillac, St. Julien, Margaux, St. Estéphe & Graves, as well as the merlot-rich right bank communes of Pomerol and St. Emilion are exceptional and may develop for a long time.

One will have to have more bling bling to shop here. The great first growth wines; Châteaux Lafite-Rothschild, Château Latour and Châteaux Cheval Blanc will be exceptional if you can be patient enough to wait 20 years or more and have the financial resources to buy at prices that start out at about $400 a bottle.

My wine buying experience with Bordeaux started just out of college in 1971. At that time you could still find a bottle or two of the great 1959 and 1961 vintages. Underrated vintages like 1962 and 1966 were more plentiful, and the simple but enjoyable, early drinking vintage of 1967 was everywhere. I bought my 1970 first growth futures and my cellar was started. I can’t tell you what I paid for these wines, it hurts too much to say, but I can tell you one thing, I didn’t buy enough.

Today, my wine buying strategy for myself and the restaurant is to put 70 percent of our allotted resources into the simpler wines that show great drinkability now, 25 percent into what I think will show well in five to 10 years, and 5 percent into the great, albeit very expensive, first growths.

Wherever your pocket book can take you, buy some 2000 Bordeaux before they’re all gone.

---

Kevin Quinn is a wine writer, enthusiast, instructor and managing partner and wine director of Apricots Restaurant in Farmington, Conn. He was consultant for Ketchum’s Evergreen Restaurant in the 1980s.

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.