The Bordeaux Wine Enthusiasts - Part I

It’s easy to find a great bottle of wine, but is it easy to find a great group of people to appreciate it with? The thought didn’t occur to me right away when I first became interested in wine. But naturally, almost as soon as I began to investigate the wine scene, I heard about all sorts of cool wine groups, drinking great wine and having a great, funny and sometimes depraved time of it. I thought, I definitely want a piece of this...
My early attempts at forming a wine group met with mixed results. A few good nights, a tolerable picnic during a heat wave and a few interesting characters were among them. There was even a little advert in the Village Voice looking for a third person to drink good French wine with. Don’t know why I didn’t respond to that one…
Then there was the wino I mean, the member of one of my fledgling groups who upon spying some harmless fellow strolling across the Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park wearing a Yale sweatshirt, said, “Hey! Did you go to Yale? Because if you didn’t, you shouldn’t be wearing that shirt!” It wasn’t exactly as I’d imagined it should be, to say the least. Although, maybe I should have cut him some slack - it was 100 degrees in the shade that day. That group didn’t last, unsurprisingly, although I did get to try my first Meursault that day and some slightly chilled Opus One.
My luck changed one day when I did an internet search and among the results were the words, Bordeaux Wine Enthusiasts. I came upon a message posting board, a Microsoft group that was festooned with all manner of referential “handles,” tasting notes of many exotic wines (to my eyes at the time – for those who don’t know what Sociando-Mallet is, it’s not French for “anti-social,” but it might be a distant cousin, or perhaps a rare disease that sometimes results in the wholesale drinking of the dump-bucket, but that’s another story), and an overall attitude that was knowing and informed, but not obviously snobbish or lame. I figured I’d give it a try. To be a little less guarded, I was totally delighted with my find and I hadn’t even begun to explore or experience it.
I can’t remember my early posts (to quote Ray Davies: Alcohol, alcohol, sad memories I can’t recall), but after checking a few of the profiles I discovered that one of them worked for my company. I was invited to my first serious, organized tasting, a comparison of second wines – the wines that top growths separate from the blend to insure the high quality of their first wines. It was a blind tasting and honestly, I could barely tell the wines apart, especially after the 18th bottle. I find blind tastings to be quite difficult and to a degree, less appealing. But it was hard work and a blast to work thought the wines, many of which were the seconds of top crus, in top vintages no less, like 1996 Carraudes de Lafite. At the end of the tasting, the coverings on the bottles were removed and I noticed that there was a bottle of 1982 Les Forts de Latour, the highly regarded second of Chateau Latour, a 1st Growth, sitting right near me. It was about one third full. Each sip tasted better and better. What a lovely wine.
I forgot to mention that upon joining the board, all I had to do was choose a “handle,” and I was in. No fee, no initiation, no application. Given the ease of access, ironically there are few if any of what I’d graciously call, “internet weirdos” on BWE. It’s always amazed me. Living in NYC, which is somewhat of an open mental ward, and being a part time professional musician, I’ve met my share of gonzo loonies. But BWE seems to scare them away. But I digress. I’m terrible at choosing my own nicknames but finally settled on Chasse-Spleen, one of my early favorite wines. Why Chasse-Spleen? I’m a fan of Lord Byron, and I read that it was one of (I’m sure there were many!) his favorite wines. That combined with the fact that it “punched above its weight” appealed to me. This means that the wine, although unclassified in the classification of 1855, still manages to reach the heights of a classed growth, albeit a fourth or fifth growth these days, in many vintages.
Before too long there was another highly appealing tasting in the works, which I signed up for: A vertical tasting of Lynch Bages, the “Poor Man’s Mouton.” Lynch is one of the favorite wines of the BD or Benevolent Dictator, the founder of BWE, as we refer to him. His favorite Lynch is the 1989. I knew he as well as quite a few of the other senior members would be at this tasting, and I was totally stoked for it. It proved to be a major success. It was held in an Italian restaurant on 53rd St, with a menu selection specifically designed for the consumption of Bordeaux wines. When I arrived, someone who had a cast on his right hand handed me a magnum of 1990 Jacquart Champagne and asked if I could please open it. “Of course,” I said. The first sips spoiled me for Champagne forever. Full bodied, mature, toasty, chunky – delicious stuff. His name, I found out, was Musigny. I hope to try that wine someday, as well.
In a nutshell, the ’78 had an amazing finish, the ’82 was astoundingly beautiful, the ’86 very tannic but fierce and fine, as well. The ’88 was a favorite, very balanced, the ’89 still kicking hard but complete and excellent, the ’90 was fantastic and exotic and way over my head – at this point I started to lose it (there were about 6 or 7 other wines I’ve omitted!) but there were more: The ’93, a big surprise but I’ve grown to appreciate ‘93s which usually blow away the awful ‘94s despite the press and prices to the contrary, the very modern ’95, and then up to the ’99 which I brought and was totally innocuous by this point, then the much heralded 2000, which was incredible and amounted to an echo of the fabulous ’82.
At the end of the tasting, a 1988 Sauturnes made the rounds – Chateau Raymond-Lafond, an unclassified but highly sought after insider’s wine from a top vintage. It was everything you could imagine, but coming after the aforementioned onslaught of dry red wine, the effect was even more pronounced. It was perfection and a real show stealer, although, that often happens at Bordeaux wine tastings – a Sauturnes comes along at the end of the night of dry, tannic and often quite a few young wines and lots of people say, “that might be my wine of the night!”
This night was a watershed in my wine education, and presents a sort of microcosm of my membership in BWE. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about wine from the other members and my association with them during my four years of being a BWEer, but I came to think of that night as a point were I jumped several steps ahead, if only from a spot close to the starting line.
I’ve often tried to describe BWE to my friends and family and even brought a few of the former along for events. The simple name, Bordeaux Wine Enthusiasts, belies the complexity and dedication of the group. For one thing, the wines that we talk about and drink are in no way limited to Bordeaux. Burgundy, Rhone, German and even California wines all get their time in the spotlight, it’s just that Bordeaux is the star of the show. California is a distant also ran.
The participants, connoisseurs and revelers alike, who converged on 53rd street in Manhattan on that night of the the Lynch-Bages tasting came from as far away as San Francisco, Texas and Maine. But the scope of BWE is even larger than that. There are members in Australia, France, England, Finland and Denmark, and other far flung places that I’ve obviously left out. Members visit each other on their home turf, be it Denmark, the South of France, or Napa Valley. But like any internet based groups, there are lurkers as well, and feuds…
To be continued…