“What are the greatest wines you’ve ever had?” I’m sometimes asked this question by friends and fellow wine lovers. Sounds like a simple question, yes? Well, no. It’s tough to give a simple answer, because there are many factors that come into play. Such as: Does this include wines I have only tasted (at a formal tasting event, wine competition, or winery), or is it only wines that I have actually drunk, with a meal, etc.? I’ve tasted – and spat out – thousands of wines at tastings over the years, and filled many notebooks with copious notes. But very few of these wines (with a couple of exceptions, as you will read below) remain in my memory bank as my greatest wine experiences.
And how to factor in price? Is this something to consider in answering which wines are the greatest one has tasted? Obviously it’s invidious to compare say a $20 wine with a $200 wine, let alone a $2,000 label. Yet that $20 wine may just be the best such wine you’ve ever had in that price category. So does it make the list?
Then there is the question of age: a wine that may well be regarded as one of the greatest may not be anywhere near its peak of perfection if broached too early in its life. Indeed, most of the world’s greatest wines (by reputation) need many years if not decades to be at their best. So if I’m tasting the currently available vintage of, say, a great Vouvray (chenin blanc) producer or a famous classed growth Bordeaux chateau, both of which need decades to show at their best, have I really tasted their greatest wines? Conversely, if I leave it too late and drink a highly reputed ‘special’ wine from my cellar that has begun its downward trajectory toward inevitable desiccation, but know that it was most likely even greater some time before I pulled the cork, does this bottle make my greatest wine list? Does reputation play a part?
Here’s my answer: For me, context is critical. A great wine tasted at a trade tasting stall surrounded by strangers slurping, spitting and note-taking is a very different experience than enjoying a great bottle of wine with a loved one or good friends over a delicious meal or special occasion. Wine is meant to be drunk, not sipped and spat out. It is a living, organic thing, constantly evolving (just like us humans) and so timing is everything, just like the most important relationships in our lives. My closest high school friend and I drifted apart and he is no longer in my life, but will always be one of my greatest friends. So too with wine. My greatest wines are those I have experienced and remember as part of memorable occasions in my life, rather than rated against a lineup of competitors at a tasting event. Those occasions may be a meal or bottle shared with someone special, or a memorable visit to a winery. So with these caveats in mind, here’s my tentative, eclectic list of the greatest wines I have had, and why.
Bordeaux First Growths
While living in Paris in 1981-82, I met and befriended a young Californian who was heading down to Bordeaux to begin a winemaking internship at a Right Bank chateau. A few weeks later he got in touch and invited me to visit him there. He met me at Libourne railway station in a state of great excitement and we drove at high speed in his Citroën Deux Chevaux to his wine estate. It was Chateau Pétrus in Pomerol, his employer was Christian Moueix, and his excitement related to the fact that the night before Moueix had hosted the owners or directors of all the Bordeaux First Growths for a comparative tasting of their wines. My friend and I gratefully enjoyed the last inch or so left in each of those famed bottles. While I took no notes and my memory is hazy, I know we drank the usual suspects: Chateaux Ausone, Cheval Blanc, Haut-Brion, Lafite-Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, Mouton Rothschild, Pétrus and d’Yquem.
I was hooked forever.
Moulin Touchais Coteaux du Layon 1959, Anjou, France
One of my very first “greatest wine” experiences was indeed tasting with a wine producer at the winery. But what a winery, and what an experience. It was in September 1983, and I was travelling through the Loire Valley with my future (first) wife and her parents. I had somehow tracked down and found Moulin Touchais, the big wine producer-negotiant in the obscure little town of Doué-la-Fontaine in the Layon River valley, a Loire tributary. M René Polleau – Moulin Touchais’ then Director and an absolute gentleman – welcomed us shyly (I doubt he had many visitors). He led us down a narrow stairway into the seemingly endless cellars carved from the solid limestone beneath the winery floor, where more than a million bottles slumbered, and there in the dank, cool gloom we tasted one vintage after another of superb, luscious, sweet Chenin Blanc, some of which had been affected by botrytis cinerea (noble rot). We finished with the 1959 (then 24 years old!) which was utterly riveting. Its sweetness was perfectly balanced with classic Chenin Blanc acidity, a wine of elegance, opulence, and extraordinary freshness that was a revelation to my relatively untutored palate. I bought a half-dozen bottles of the then current 1975 vintage and enjoyed them immensely over subsequent years. But nothing can compare to that bottle of 1959 in those ancient cellars with M Polleau. Everlasting.
Chateau Léoville Barton 1949, Saint-Julien Grand Cru Classé
I encountered this wine at an extraordinary tasting put on by La Vigneronne Wine Club and led by Clive Coates MW at L’Escargot Restaurant, London in November 1983, where I was living as a student. I had begun to dabble in buying wines at auction, but this was one of my first truly great Bordeaux experiences, and an early lesson in the virtues of patience: at 34 years old it was just peaking, according to Coates. L’Escargot is London’s oldest French restaurant and, coincidently, this Chateau Léoville Barton was the oldest – and for me the best – wine we tasted that night, alongside several other classed growth Bordeaux ranging from 1966 (Chateau Giscours) through 1959 (Chateaux Gruaud Larose and Lynch Bages) to 1952 (Chateaux Ausone and Pontet Canet) and a couple other vintages, all the way back to this estimable 1949. While my diary entry is notably short on any description of these wines, I ranked the Léoville Barton highest at 18.5 points out of 20 (these being blessedly pre 100-point scoring days). More importantly, it introduced me to the refined pleasures of perfectly mature Bordeaux, an elusive taste that I’ve never lost and still seek out today.
Remoissenet Pere et Fils Meursault Poruzots 1er Cru Tete de Cuvée 1972
After I moved to Canada in 1985 I discovered the wine treasures of Robert Simpson’s Liberty Wine Store located in that orphaned outpost of the USA called Point Roberts, just south of Vancouver. It was here in July 1986 that I bought my first ever bottle of serious white (Chardonnay) Burgundy – this 1972 vintage of Les Poruzots 1er Cru. Les Poruzots lies in the middle of the Meursault 1er Cru vineyards, between Les Genevrieres and Les Boucheres. So hallowed turf for white Burgundy. I remember drinking it in the back garden of our house in Vancouver on a perfect evening that same summer: it was a revelation of nutty, honeyed complexity, with integrated toast, butterscotch and brioche from the oak fermentation and aging, and a full-bodied, creamy, yet taut texture that I’d never had before in a white wine. It had layers of complex stone fruits on the smooth, lingering finish, and was still amazingly fresh at 14 years old. While perhaps not the ‘greatest’ white Burgundy by reputation or vineyard, it’s the wine that first turned me on to the magic of Bourgogne blanc and will stay with me forever.
Meerlust Rubicon 1986
I bought this bottle (for R23!) while on a visit to South Africa in March 1991 and then poured it at a South African tasting and dinner with wine friends back in Vancouver in May of that year. As other wine writers have noted, Meerlust Rubicon (a classic Bordeaux blend of 70% Cabernet Sauvignon and roughly equal parts Merlot and Cabernet Franc) is one of the Cape’s most iconic red wines, and in my view perhaps the closest equivalent that South Africa has to a Bordeaux First Growth (but without the eye-watering price). Meerlust Estate has been in the same Myburgh family for eight generations now, and its flagship red wine, first produced in 1980 and one of South Africa’s first Bordeaux varietal blends, is a testament to how good Cape wine can be. A new style of wine had been created in South Africa and, as its name implies, a line had been crossed from which there would be no turning back. The 1986 vintage was particularly propitious for Cape reds, and Rubicon was among the very best. I recall great purity, smooth elegance and finesse. My notes read “Complex, spicy, tannic length. Very Medoc. Young.” I await the 2010, still in my cellar.
Paul Jaboulet Aîné Hermitage La Chapelle 1985
A truly great wine from an excellent year, from one of France’s most iconic vineyards. This classic Syrah is off old vines grown on the steep south-facing granite hillside slope above Tain l’Hermitage in the northern Rhone Valley. Jaboulet has owned about a fifth of this famed vineyard for decades and in the 20th century made the most famous version of its wine. Hermitage is the ultimate expression of the Syrah grape and no one did it better than Jaboulet in that year. As Jancis Robinson once described it, Hermitage is slow to mature, very deep in colour, magnificently and hauntingly savoury rather than sweet and flirtatious (the Australian version). I had bought it in 1987, and opened it with a couple of good wine friends at home in March 2014. At almost 30 years of age, it was still in great form: smooth, layered, complex and fully integrated; savoury, gamey, earthy, yet perfumed. A wine for the ages, sadly now gone.
Chateau Beychevelle 1982, Saint-Julien Grand Cru Classé
Note the pattern here? Yes, it’s no accident this is the second Saint-Julien wine to make it onto this list. I’ve always particularly admired the balance of finesse and power that the wines of this Haut-Médoc commune typically show: somewhere between the more ‘masculine’ Pauillac and more ‘feminine’ Margaux. For me Saint-Julien is the perfect expression of Left Bank Bordeaux. This ’82 was also bought at Liberty Wines in Point Roberts in September 1986 where I had tasted it alongside several other top rated Left Bank 82s (Chateaux Palmer, Pichon-Lalande and Cos D’Estournel). I poured it as part of the lineup for my first ever commissioned wine tasting, at the Elmwood Club in Toronto in March 1989. Elegant, graceful and complex, with tremendous aromatic richness and plenty of tannins. It was probably tasted too young. Still… Beychevelle has retained a special place in my heart, and I have the 2010 in my cellar. Patience…
These next two wines were, incredibly, both drunk on the same memorable day, 7 May 2016!
Lopez de Heredia Viña Tondonia Blanco Rioja Gran Reserva 1991
On our visit to the Basque Country (Euskadi) in Northern Spain in May 2016, my wife Shirly and I headed to the tiny fishing village of Getaria some 20 km west of San Sebastian, for lunch at the inimitable Kaia Kaipe Restaurant overlooking the harbour. From their encyclopaedic wine list, we ordered this bottle of mature white Rioja with the perfectly fire-grilled turbot meal. At 25 years of age, it was extraordinary: deep golden yellow with a tawny edge, an oxidative nose of great complexity and layered notes, and a taste that was round, smooth, and full of persistent, layered nutty flavours. This wine was made from all-estate grown Viura (90%) and Malvasía (10%), and aged in small American oak barrels for at least ten years. This allowed a very slow process of oxidation to take place through the pores of the wood, which played a key part in the development of the wine’s bouquet. Further bottle aging creates the seductive bouquet of spice, bitter almonds, vanilla and walnut that are the trademarks of Lopez de Heredia’s majestic Viña Tondonia whites.
We drank Spanish wine history this day: a classic, traditional style of aged white Rioja that is increasingly rare. More’s the pity.
CVNE Viña Real Rioja Reserva 1981
After lunch in Getaria, we drove back to San Sebastian. That same night we had dinner at Rekondo Restaurant, famed across Spain and the wine world for its positively biblical wine list (it runs to several hundred pages) and huge stocks of aged Spanish wines, going back to the 19th century! Lourdes Rekondo welcomed us warmly and generously allowed me to visit the wine cellar (‘wine museum’ would be a more apt term) with sommelier Martin Flea. We spent most of an hour down there! It was Lourdes’ father Txomin Rekondo who assembled this collection of (mostly) Spanish gems over many years. With our outstanding dinner of chargrilled oxtail we drank a bottle of the CVNE Viña Real Rioja Reserva 1981, a year that is considered to be a great Rioja vintage. This time a red (mostly Tempranillo), at 35 years of age it was another sublime example of how well-made traditional Rioja can age in the bottle. This wine was hand harvested from selected blocks in Rioja Alavesa, the smallest of the three Rioja sub-regions. It offered up an elegant yet delicate nose of dried flowers and leather, and deep umami flavours balanced with fruit compote and toast.
Spanish wine history, Lesson Two.
While neither Kaia Kaipe nor Rekondo have any Michelin stars (San Sebastian is lousy with starred places), I can honestly say that these are two of the most memorable meals I’ve ever had, accompanied by two of the greatest wines I have ever enjoyed. It’s all about context.
Klein Constantia Vin de Constance 2005
On our first mini-trip away together soon after we began dating, Shirly and I found ourselves dining at a highly rated new restaurant in Seattle in summer 2010. After an excellent, wine-fuelled meal, I noticed this iconic Cape wine on the dessert wine list and ordered a couple glasses for us. I had tasted it before in South Africa but this was Shirly’s first encounter with this impeccable recreation of the legendary Constantia dessert wine that swept 19th century Europe. Made from selected late harvest (but not botrytized) Muscat de Frontignan, the shrivelled grapes were hand harvested and then left to soften on their skins for several days before fermentation in a combination of stainless steel tanks and oak barrels. Maturation time in the cellar before bottling was four years. This golden sweet wine is pure nectar, and its unctuous sweetness was balanced by perfectly-poised acidity. Absolutely delicious. Shirly fell in love with it and, I’m happy to say, with me too, and we have been happily married for four years now. One of the world’s greatest dessert wines, shared with one of my world’s greatest people. Our personal favourite.
So there you have it. My personal selection of the ‘greatest’ wines I’ve ever had. For those of you so inspired, I’d love to read your lists.