a fine wine tasting archive
6 notes
Krug declared three vintages in a row — 1988, 1989, 1990 — and 1990 was the ripest of them. This was the original release, not the later Collection re-issue: thirty-six years under its own cork, and still carrying its acidity.
The Cathelin began as a painting by a family friend, and 1990 was its first vintage — made only in years with something to say, each bottle numbered. Thirty-five years on, the dark fruit still holds the center.
La Grande Dame is named for Barbe-Nicole Clicquot, widowed at twenty-seven, who ran the house for sixty years and invented the riddling table. The 1990, Pinot Noir-led from eight grand cru villages, in magnum at thirty-one — the format that keeps Champagne young longest, at the age where that matters.
A puy is a rise in the ground, and Grand-Puy-Lacoste sits on a high gravel plateau behind Pauillac, away from the river and the first growths. The 1990 — a hot, generous year on a Cabernet-heavy estate — was thirty-one years old and had settled into the middle of a very long life.
The bottle says Fleur de Champagne, which is what Belle Epoque was called in America for forty years. The 1990 inside it came from the ripest Champagne harvest since 1959, and it opened a five-bottle evening at thirty years old.
Bruno Paillard founded his house in 1981, the first new name in Champagne for decades. Nine years later he bottled a Le Mesnil Blanc de Blancs from the great 1990 vintage, in magnum only. Thirty years on, it had become the oldest wine on a table that included a 2000 Barolo.