Judging Wines at a Tasting

Posted 01/28/2008 at 10:15 AM by Ben

How do you judge the best wine at a tasting? Is it the one that gets the the 100 point score? The most expensive? The one that gives you the best buzz?

At the recent UGC (Union of Grand Cru) tastings of the 2005 Bordeaux, a new criteria appears to have emerged: which wine was sopped by the crowd fastest.

At the New York Waldorf-Astoria tasting that I attended, this prize was won by 2005 Château Pichon Longueville Baron. The last drop was poured about 15 minutes before the end of the tasting. As far as I could tell, it was the only wine at the New York event to attract enough thirsty wine lovers to sell out before the end of the event.

I can think of worse ways to judge a wine. The 2005 Pichon Longueville Baron was the wine of the day for me, and fortunately, I got there early enough to taste it not once, but a second time, just to validate my initial impression. My guess is that a lot of others were doing the same, which may explain why it won the drinking contest.

But as always, there's room to disagree about which wine is truly the best. After the Los Angeles and Chicago events, the internet chat boards were lit up about Château Troplong-Mondotf, a well-regarded St-Emilion classified growth. It sold out even earlier in those cities than Pichon Longueville Baron did in New York.

This could be explained by the quality of the wine, which was indeed excellent, but maybe not. An awful lot of the posts about Troplong-Mondotf were from young males oozing over the beauty of the owner's twentysomething daughter, who was doing the pouring. Whoever said sex appeal has nothing to do with great wine certainly got that wrong.

Tasting Note: 2005 Pichon Longueville Baron ($175): No matter how you measure it, 2005 Pichon Longueville Baron is a great wine.  It's packed with oodles of fresh fruit, but also has the kind of layered complexity that marks the greatest Bordeaux wines from the greatest vintages. If I hadn't seen the label, I would've guessed it was a 2005 first growth such as Château Latour or Mouton-Rothschild, both of which cost three or four times as much in the 2005 vintage.

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