a fine wine tasting archive
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2003 was the summer Europe cooked. White Burgundy from that year was written off almost before it was bottled: too much alcohol, no acidity, drink it up. Twenty-three years on, the acidity was the first thing to arrive in the glass. Bottle 1,709 of 2,871.
For nine vintages Manfred Krankl and the Austrian sweet-wine master Alois Kracher made dessert wines together under a shared initial. The Straw Man was their vin de paille: Sémillon dried on straw mats, in half-bottles, and gone for good after 2006.
Cantemerle was left off the 1855 classification and got itself added a few months later after its owner confronted the brokers — the only estate besides Mouton to have moved the list. The 2003, from the summer of the heatwave, at seventeen years.
No vineyard name on the label, and no fixed vineyard behind it either. Cardinale is reassembled from scratch every year out of mountain fruit, and the 2003 came from four sites that have almost nothing in common.
An English engineer's Cabernet estate on a mountain slope in Knights Valley, from a vintage that punished impatience. At seventeen years, the 2003 had grown into itself — and it was drunk with takeaway Sichuan on a Friday night.