Bordeaux Unsung Hero Competition Friday, November 21, 08 7:30pm
Challenge yourself, Challenge us, Find the winning bottle!
2000 Château Pipeau, St Emilion Grand Cru ($300) This is the first blind-tasted bottle. Tight upfront. Dynamic aromas starting with blackberry and sweet spices, then licorice and impressions of chocolate, coffee beans, and beautiful French vanilla notes. Solid structure, perfectly accompanied by a delicate velvety touch. An excellent bottle that can benefit from further aging. Sadly, we finished the wine before it has revealed all of its potential characters.
2001 Château Cantemerle, Haut Medoc (HK$305) Green bell pepper opening up to dark fruits on the nose, with flavors or mint and chocolate. Rich on the palate with plenty of black fruits. Medium-length finish.
2003 Château Labat, St. Julien (Cru Bourgeois) (HK$185) Sweeter palate than the previous two bottles. Plumy, fruity, sweet black cherry and vanilla. An easy to drink wine, not too complex.
2005 Château Puygueraud (HK$210)
Beautiful aromas typical of a great Bordeaux - blackberry, blackcurrent, licorice, and sweet spices. Complex palette with an interesting minerally note, drawing up an odd image of strolling along on a sandy beach with bouquets of violets. Very balanced and firmly structured, with good alcohol and ample tannins.
2003 Château de Fonbel, St Emilion Grand Cru (HK$290) A simpler, friendlier wine than the Puygueraud. Sweeter nose with ripe berries. Supple on the palate with a moderate body, rounded tannins, and good acidity.
2002 Château Monbousquet, St Emilion Grand Cru (HK$350) Fascinating nose, with dark fruits, dried fruits, dried flowers, cedar, light tobacco, and game aromas. Expressive dried fruits on the palate. Unlike the others, this bottle is quite ready for consumption.
2003 Château de Fonbel, St Emilion Grand Cru (HK$290) Warmer on the nose, dark black fruits, cedar, crushed rocks, and hints of oysters. Full-bodied, high alcohol, a wine for those who likes it though.
2001 Château Langoa Barton, St Julien (HK$390)
Captivating bouquet of blackcurrent, pencil-shavings, violets, and sweet spices. Intriguing on the palette - full-bodied, solid underlying structure, but in a silky and very refined manner. With all elements of a brilliant unsung hero, this is an excellent bottle to end the tasting flight!
With the tumbling of the Hang Seng Index, we decided that it is time to leave the world of Margaux, Lafite, and Latour for the valued “unsung heroes”. Though not priced in the prestigious category, “Unsung Heroes” are the backbone of Bordeaux, offering reasonably priced, superior quality wines. They are the hidden Bordeaux gems.
To make this challenging, we organized a competition to find the best bottle of "unsung hero". Each contestant brought the bottle that he/she believed could win and satisfied the competition criteria (the wine must be from Bordeaux and priced under HK$400). To ensure fairness, all the bottles were tasted blind.
It was a fun night. All the bottles were cream of the crowd and definitely worth buying again. On the rating scale of 1-10, the average score for the 8 bottles came out pretty close, with less than 1 point difference between the top and last ranked bottle. Blind-tasting was definitely a fair assessment as some of the contestants gave the lowest scores to their own bottles!
The winners for the night: 2003 Carbonnieux won the gold, closely followed by the 2005 Puygueraud and 2001 Langoa Barton. 2002 Monbousquet took the bronze. Price-wise, Puygueraud is the best buy.
For this dinner event, we did not want to impose on the contestants to arrive early with the bottles, thus ended up not having enough time to aerate the bottles. We did a lot of swirling to manually open the wines. In future event, we should arrange for early drop off so the bottles have enough time to aerate and we can taste the beautiful bouquet with less swirling exercise!
