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Spectator Wine Club
Auberon Waugh
So, in response to various hoots, whistles
and groans I have at last exerted myself to find some decent, reasonably priced claret and a white Bordeaux which I can recommend. The trouble with claret, as 1
i never stop complaining, is that the best is too grotesquely over-priced to be worth thinking about and even the better classified growths climb so steeply in price that one can never really be certain at what Point one is being ripped off. For a tiny im- provement in quality, as between an unknown and a vaguely heard of chateau, one suddenly finds that the price has -lumped £3 a bottle; among better-known chateaux, it can jump £10 for every point 0.n the IWFS vintage rating. On this occa- sion I have stuck to very minor châteaux and searched for wine whose quality would be acceptable at that price even with a Spanish or colonial label. This may not be a very dignified way to treat the foremost wine-producing area of the world, but the Bordelais have been asking for it, and I think all the wines shown represent some sort of bargain, if only by the standards of Bordeaux. . The first three wines are all made by the illustrious Moueix family, who also make Petrus, Trotanoy, La Fleur-Petrus, Mag- Pdelairie and many of the better wines of omerol and St Emilion. Corney and Bar- w specialise in these two areas and are in fa▪ ct the sole agents in this country for many cli.f the best châteaux, including those listed auove. But I have no idea what part of the region my first wine comes from. Bel-Airs Ze more common in Bordeaux even than urs, or Dunroamins in Devon. It e d eausei° thurMelY has a Cabernet Sauvignon, rather 411 a Merlot base, and strikes me as slight- and with a cleaner taste than you hyef to find in the £3.12 bracket from ,f. highly competitive claret-style Riojas ;inch are beginning to arrive. In other the saute I tasted it against various Riojas in e same price range and it came out on 1°P ..But even with its pretty label and 11- str• ious maker, it is definitely a wine for rig down rather than brooding and gr°wmg maudlin over. Nobody will find it u
_?Pleasant and a few may decide it is just woat they have always been looking for.
The Château Maquin, from the St Georges satellite village of St Emilion, sumps £1.10 from the Bordeaux Superieur eg▪ yove, but it has a thoroughly decent, classical St Emilion taste and, at £4.22, is a great deal cheaper than most St Emilions around.
a In
my experience, St Emilions stay
about this level of quality — thoroughly eh_efoYable, sound merlot-based wine — %_gardless of price, until they make the sud- '11 quantum jump into the stratosphere of Ausone, Cheval Blanc and, to a lesser ex- tent, Figeac. It is silly to chase them up the ladder, better to stay on the lower rungs. Anyway, this is a good example and I judg- ed it worth the £1.10 price jump.
Château des Moines, in Lalande-de- Pomerol, is an even smaller property from which J-P Moueix just about manages to squeeze 2,000 cases a year and is deliciously easy to drink, without great complexity or length. For some reason I cannot explain, these middle-range Pomerols always remind me of mutton fat. It is hard enough to find any Pomerol at all now that the Americans have developed such a taste for it, but Pomerol-fanciers who like sticking their noses with a good, fat merlot smell will be grateful to Messrs Corney and Barrow for this example at (just) under £5 a bottle. Bahans Haut Brion is the second wine of Château Haut-Brion, probably made from its younger vines. Until 1973 it was sold, unusually for the second wine of a premier cru, as a non-vintage blend of two or three vintages. However, since 1976 it has been offered only as a vintage wine. Chateau Haut-Brion itself was voted to have produc- ed the best 1976 in the whole of Bordeaux. I am not by nature a Graves man, finding its stony austerity rather too precious for my gross and voluptuous tastes — in fact the whole search for some decent clarets has been a conscientious exercise, rather than a self-indulgent one — and I was suitably ap- palled by the price on first tasting. It seem- ed rather softer than many Graves, but still iron-y and thin, with no great length. Returning to the same bottle 16 hours later, I began to appreciate its crippling elegance. Obviously it is a bottle to keep, or to open 12 hours early in a warm room and decant clumsily, but I rather fancy that the real claret drinker, behind his thin smile and left-wing Wykehamist-style pebble spec- tacles, will rave about it.
Doisy-Datne is chiefly famous as a deuxieme cru Barsac, named apparently after an Englishman who bought it years ago. Does anyone know an Englishman called Doisy-Daene? The dry white cannot use the Barsac appelation. I have never tasted the sweet wine, but the dry example is something of a revelation. It is immensely popular with the French, who cannot buy enough of it. Hugh Johnson describes it somewhat puzzlingly as a 'trend-setting dry one, a model for growers who want to restore the old prestige of Graves'. It is true that white Graves — and all dry white Bordeaux — enjoys a poor reputation, mostly because it has been so foul for so long: sulphurated, flat and generally filthy. Now, by a new process of cold fermenta- tion, some of them are beginning to pull their socks up. This wine is highly scented, at the same time crisp and fresh in its mix of Semillon grapes with Sauvignon, Chardon- nay, Muscadelle and even Riesling. I feel it deserves a big hand at under £3.80.
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