The Finesse of Bordeaux and Stepping into Serbia: Weekly Tasting Report (Dec 7-13)

We continue to work through hundreds of Bordeaux 2020 samples each week in our office in Hong Kong and have found some spectacular bottles, including the Château Canon St.-Emilion 2020. You may remember that the 2015 Canon was our Wine of the Year in 2018, and it was a perfect wine. The finesse, depth and balance of the wine still ring clearly on my palate. The 2020 is in the same vein although I didn’t rate it 100 points. Canon is making wines with power and finesse in top vintages such as 2018, 2019, and 2020, and it is a benchmark for St. Emilion.

We tasted many other outstanding wines from Bordeaux over the past week, with 133 of them listed below, and have rated just over 500 Bordeaux 2020 in total, finding some exciting wines at all levels. We like the reds from some of the satellite appellations such as Castillon-Côtes de Bordeaux and Fronsac, as well as from key ones such as Pomerol. The top wineries from the hillsides of St. Emilion are sure to also have great wine, as illustrated by the Canon 2020. We haven’t tasted many top names in the Medoc, but this report includes the likes of such esteemed chateaux as Gloria, Prieure-Lichine and Lagrange. And they show a balance and structure that I remember from tasting them in barrel.

One Bordeaux 2020 you should definitely check out in the list below is the Anseillan, a new third wine from Chateau Lafite-Rothschild. It comes from a single vineyard just east of the chateau. Managing Director Saskia de Rothschild lives nearby with her family. It’s a blend of 48 percent merlot, 39 percent cabernet sauvignon and 13 percent petit verdot. It’s excellent quality and surprisingly drinkable at this stage.

READ MORE TOP 100 WINES OF FRANCE 2022

Bordeaux wines were not the only ones we tasted from France. Just after the Canon 2020 at the very top were three stunning Champagnes from Philipponnat, all from the exceptional Clos des Goisses. It's a 5.5-hectare walled vineyard on a very steep, south-facing chalk slope in Mareuil-sur-Ay, which consistently produces intense and structured vintage Champagnes. Their latest 2013 release, a fresher vintage in the region, is sophisticated, framed and well-structured, with very fine, tight bubbles, made from 85 percent pinot noir with 15 percent chardonnay, aged for eight years on lees. It's still tightly wound and is one for the cellar.

Just as impressive is the Philipponnat Champagne Clos des Goisses Juste Extra Brut Rosé 2012, with gorgeous aromas of spices, hazelnuts and red berries. It’s fine and silky, yet firm and phenolic. Only 2,255 bottles were made, though. We also tasted the Philipponnat Champagne Clos des Goisses Extra Brut L.V. 1997. Released 25 years later after "long vieillissement,” it is impressively fresh and vibrant, with fantastic complexity and length. Philiponnat is the first Champagne house to be sold on La Place de Bordeaux, with these three wines released on La Place in September.

We are also starting to taste through about 500 samples from Portugal, mostly by Associate Editor Claire Nesbitt. And she is finding some gems from the Douro Valley, from such well-known producers as Casa Ferreirinha and Wine & Soul. Stay tuned for more ratings in the future.

Senior Editor Stuart Pigott recently spent a week in Serbia as a guest speaker for a wine show and tasted a few dozen wines from that country as well as Bosnia-Herzegovina. He found a few 90-plus wines. You may recall that I tasted a few wines from Serbia this summer, including an excellent syrah from the family of tennis sensation Novak Djokovic. Serbia shows potential to make truly outstanding quality wines but it will take some time.

Stuart found a mix of international varieties like chardonnay, riesling and cabernet sauvignon alongside indigenous varieties such as prokopac and vranac growing in wine regions scattered across the two countries.

“Looking at my notes, there’s no simple pattern, except that certain producers reliably produce good wines,” Stuart said. “The most obvious of them being Radovanovic, Vukoje and Monastry Tvrdos for reds, and Kovacevic and Deuric for whites.”

“The best wines have a surprising elegance that I put down to the combination of warm days and cool nights in summer, as much as to winemaking,” he said, citing one cabernet sauvignon offering from the Radovanovic winery in particular.

Stuart said there were also some muscular, earthy and herbal reds from the vranac grape, including from the Vukoje winery, although “some of the reds are being over-oaked and over-extracted in order to make a big, bold impression. That’s not a specifically Serbian problem, but it was something I repeatedly bumped into.”

We will release more ratings of Serbian wines as we taste through them.

LAFITE'S LONG DAI

Senior Editor Zekun Shuai continued to taste Chinese wines over the past week in Beijing, with the top highlight coming from DBR Lafite’s project in Shandong Province’s Qiushan Valley: Long Dai. The 2020 vintage showcases balance and freshness compared with 2019, which was an arid and warm year that yielded more structured wines with lower acidity and a suppler, rounder mouthfeel.

“It was a pretty typical vintage for us,” Long Dai’s technical manager, Denise Cosentino, said of the 2020, likening it to the debut 2017 vintage, which was only released after a decade-long study of the terroir. “2020 was much fresher. We had some good rain in the spring, and the temperature was generally cooler.”

The grand vin Long Dai Qiushan 瓏岱丘山 2020 is indeed fresh, showing a vibrant yet understated purity amid a basketful of lively fruit. The palate echoes with that freshness, delivering poise on the nose with deep yet seamless, spherical tannins, rendering class and gravity to the wine. It is also a vintage where we see more cabernet franc (24 percent) and marselan (20 percent) than in the brooding 2019, which was 85 percent cabernet sauvignon. Even though the vines for the Long Dai, which are planted on 34 hectares divided into 400-plus terraces, are still young, we see the potential for greater depth in the wines in the long run.

READ MORE TOP 100 WORLD WINES 2022 AND OUR WINE OF THE YEAR

The Long Dai Qiushan Hu Yue 瓏岱琥岳丘山 2020, meanwhile, is a blend of 53 percent cabernet sauvignon, 21 percent cabernet franc, 12 percent marselan, 8 percent syrah and 6 percent merlot. It shows a similar vein of freshness, purity and vibrancy although on a less profound level, but it still delivers excellent drinkability and crunch. According to Cosentino, the inclusion of syrah and merlot gives the wine a gourmand character.

Another Chinese wine we rated highly comes from Ningxia’s well-regarded 2019 vintage. It was a year that produced plenty of flavorful, plush and concentrated wines, and the GiantMonte Cabernet Franc Ningxia More Sun 枕山品丽珠沐阳珍藏干红葡萄酒 2019 is one of them. It is a serious, structured, full-bodied cabernet franc dialed up with the sort of new-world plushness and generosity we would expect from Ningxia, but it remains contained and balanced with dense yet fine-grained tannins.

GiantMonte is the personal project of one of Ningxia’s most respected winemakers and consultants, Jiang Tao, who makes wines for four Ningxia vintners, including Chateau Huahao, an excellent marselan producer. This More Sun 2019 comes from some of the oldest cabernet franc plantings in Ningxia and shows what the grape can do when it comes from the right vintage and is put into the right hands.

James Suckling, Editor/Chairman; Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor; Zekun Shuai, Senior Editor

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated during the past week by James Suckling and the other tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. Some will be included in upcoming tasting reports.

Note: You can sort the wines below by country, vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.