The 100-Point Taste

When we go wine tasting, we tend to visit the better wineries in the regions we visit.  What’s the point of travelling such long distances just to sample the ordinary wines we might find at a store back home?  But even the best wineries are reluctant to open bottles of their most expensive, rarest wines for casual visitors, and we are not accustomed to buying the highest priced bottles. So we hardly ever get to taste the wines with top scores granted by Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate, or Wine Enthusiast, and certainly nothing rated 100.  So here’s how we got to try a 100-point wine.

In 2002, we were visiting Bordeaux at the vendange, or harvest time. Wine tasting there is a lot different than Americans are used to.  We may be used to names that are Chateau This-or-That, but in Bordeaux the famous wines are really grown in the estates surrounding actual castles.  They do offer tastings, but not to just anyone who happens to be driving by.  There are “appointment only” wineries in the US, but if they have an opening, most will accommodate the casual visitor.  Not so in Bordeaux.

So if you plan to visit, make appointments months in advance or use a broker.  These brokers charge a hefty fee just to get you into the best-known chateaux.  We used one on our trip, and she spread out our visits around the region: Macon one day, St. Emilion the next and then Sauternes.  The latter is probably the world’s best known producer of dessert wines, named after the village of Sauternes.  What most people don’t know is that there is only one winery, Guiraud, that is actually in the village.  The others are in the outskirts or in another nearby village, Barsac.  Even with France’s strict appellation rules, wines from Barsac are allowed to use the name Sauternes.

After a memorable lunch at a relais in the village, we pulled up to a winery in Barsac named Doisy Daene, where the broker had arranged a tasting.  This was no grand castle, but a working facility.  “Okay”, we thought, “we have an appointment so let’s go in”.  There was only one person in the winery, a rather elderly gentleman.  We introduced ourselves and he immediately recognized Lucie’s Quebecois accent.  “Nous adorons votre accent”, he told her (We adore your accent).  This was amusing because the French are usually rather proprietary about their accents, so Lucie was pleased to hear him say it.

It worked out that he was the former winemaker, now retired, and he was filling in for his son, the current winemaker that afternoon.  He took us for a tour and let us try some white table wine right out of a fermenting tank.  Because it was the harvest, the grapes had been pressed only a few days previously.  It was horrible, and we two visitors looked at each other disappointedly.  We hadn’t visited Bordeaux to drink lousy white wine.

Then he took us into a small room to sample what we had come for, their dessert wine.  This was no tasting room, just a little office off the barrel room.  First he offered us a 2000, which was very good but still a bit young.  Then he poured some Sauternes from the 1990 harvest, known to be a millesime.   This was a really excellent wine, amber in color, round in the mouth, deliciously sweet.  Finally he opened a little refrigerator and took out an unlabeled half bottle, with no cork but a piece of aluminum foil on top.  This was the as yet unreleased, unbottled 2001, just a year from its harvest.  He told us that he was offering us this special treat parce que vous êtes Canadienne (because you’re a Canadian girl), with what might have been a wink at Lucie.

With the first sip, fireworks went off in our mouths.  This was the most magnificent Sauternes, in fact any dessert wine, we’d ever tasted.  (It still is.)  We wanted to buy some, but since it wasn’t even in bottles yet, how would we get it home?  Sadly, we let the opportunity slip.

As you might have guessed, when the wine was released a year later, Wine Spectator gave it 100 points.  You never know.

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