The only negative about SF'11...

[JimHow]

...was the two flawed bottles of '89 Lynch Bages in the blind tasting.
A major disappointment, because the '89 Baron was showing well, it would have been fin to see the two old combatants going at it at their best....
Otherwise, the wines of the blind tasting showed very well.

[JonB]

No notes yet on the blind tasting? I'm going totally on memory, which became progressively worse as I sampled most of the wines that came by.....if I had 20 plus stems (instead of the 3) I probably would have used them all as it was hard to refuse pours of so many great wines, and it would have been nice to follow them over the course of the evening.....

The single-blind '89/'90 tasting of 5 wines:
(and I may have mixed up the group's scores or the real identities....)

Flight 1
Wine A: Muted cabernet nose, cassis and raspberries, this wine had some structure but wasn't showing much fruit. My guess '90 Cos d'Estournel, actually '90 Cos d'Estournel. My #4 wine, the group's #4.

Wine B: Showing more fruit than the previous wine, and more cassis emerged over time, very nice balance, refined, not extroverted, long finish. My guess '89 Lynch. Actually '90 Pichon Lalande. My #2 wine, the group's #1.

Wine C: My initial impression on the bouquet was "woe" with a lot of green herbs and forest floor, and then it became all tannin and just a hint of fruit. As it aired and I swirled over the next 10 to 15 minutes, it became even more tannin dominated. My guess was the '89 Leoville Las Cases was still shut down and not showing anything. My last place wine, and the group's last place wine by far(it was revealed to be the 1989 Chateau Lynch-Bages). A blind bottle poured about half an hour after the blind-shootout concludedtasted very similar to this wine c, and it was a mess.....and was revealed to be the 1989 Lynch Bages.

Flight 2
Wine D: This is a gorgeous, powerful wine. Still a lot of structure, but fresh and showing power and years of life ahead of it....currant, black fruits, earthiness....complex and long. My #1 wine, the group's #3.
My guess '89 Baron, turned out to be the '89 Las Cases.

Wine E: This roared out of the glass with ripe fruit, much more lush than any of the other wines, and seemed to me much more merlot-based. My #3 wine, the group's #2. My guess '90 Pichon. Actually '89 Pichon Baron.



Unfortunately I spaced and missed the post on bringing the '90 Leoville Barton, so we were shy one wine. This is a wine that is just entering a good phase, so it may be a candidate for a future tasting. Sorry everyone.

[JimHow]

I do not buy the results for a second, Jon.
I truly believe there was a mix-up. My top wine was B, and there was no doubt it was the Lynch.
We had another bottle of Lynch at my table afterwards, and it was identical to wine B.
There was some sort of mix up. Obviously, wine C, which I picked as by FAR the worst (like everyone else), was not Lynch.
Wine C was not just the fifth "best" of the five wines, it was BAD... almost undrinkable, literally... Orlando and I were pouring it out, it was undrinkable. It had to be the Lalande.

[DavidG]

I thought the only negative about SF'11 would be...

... that it's over.

It really sounds like you guys had a fabulous time.

As to any mix-ups...

I wasn't even there, but as unpredictable as blind tastings are, and we all know how humbled we can be when faced with a line-up of hooded bottels, there is one UNDENIABLE, ROCK-SOLID, TAKE-IT-TO-THE-BANK CERTAINTY about blind tastings:

If Jim How is in the room and '89 Lynch Bages is in the lineup, YOU CAN BE SURE THERE WILL BE INTRIGUE!

[JimHow]

This blind tasting was very fishy.
Nobody got all five out of five correct.
Nobody got even four out of five.
And I think only three people got even three out of five correct.
The bottles were disguised not by Werner or Ed but, supposedly, by someone from the restaurant.
I'd be interested in knowing how many thought wine B was the Lynch.
I know it can never be proven at this point as the forensic evidence has been destroyed, but no one will ever convince me that the undrinkable, supermarket-level wine C was the Lynch!
There was definitely a mix up.

[SF Ed]

Let me clear up a bunch of things:

We disguised the bottles. David, Nancy and Werner. The restaurant had nothing to do with it.

I personally did the reveal. The bottles were correctly labelled.

I tallied the bulk of the results. Without question the wine most correctly identified was B, Pichon Lalande.

And let me correct the answer key:

A was the '90 Cos
B was the '90 Pichon Lalande
C was the '89 Lynch Bages
D was the '89 Leoville Las Cases
E was the '89 Pichon Baron

All Saturday proved to me, once more, is that there are no great wines, only great bottles of wine. And we had a lot of great bottles of wine. We just didn't have great bottles of '89 Lynch Bages in the tasting.

SF Ed

[JimHow]

If wine B was the Lalande and wine C was the Lynch, then blind tastings are meaningless because, as you say, there are only good bottles. Wine B tasted exactly like the Lynch I've had over a hundred times, and wine C tasted like the barely supermarket level Lalande I've had a number of times over the years.

[JimHow]

Then again, I always pick the wrong wines in blind tastings, so that's not saying much.

[Jay Winton]

I felt good about identifying 2 of the wines correctly. A nice tasting for sure.

[aimeedogdogdog]

The blind tasting was tricky. A few observations:

1. The ladies performed better than the gentlemen. 4 of the former got 2 wines identified correctly, while 1 of the later 2 wines and another of the later 3 wines.
2. There were 3 bottles of Lynch Bages that night: 2 for the blind tasting and the third for drinking with the meal and the whoopie pies. After the identification of the blind tasting wine being revealed, I went around and poured some of the 3rd bottle (without the tasters knowing what wine it was), and asked what wine from the blind tasting was. Most didn't relate to the Lynch bages. Then I changed my question by asking "Is it C (Lynch Bages)?" when I kept pouring to a few more guests. And this time, almost everyone said it was.
3. The group ranking of the blind tasting is as follows:
#1 (best wine) -- wine E (Pichon Baron)
#2 -- wine D (LLC)
#3 -- wine B (Pichon Lalande)
#4 -- wine A (Cos d'Estournel)
#5 -- wine C (Lynch Bages)
4. The most correctly identified wine is wine E (Pichon Baron) with 9 times, while the second most next wine B (Pichon Lalande) 7 times.

I agreed with Jim that wine B tasted like a good bottle of Lynch Bages '89. It was not quite mature yet but the complexity was there. At first I picked it as my second wine of the blind tasting after wine E (Pichon Baron '89), which was very velvety, smooth, tasty, and ready to drink. Then I changed and picked wine B as my top wine of the blind tasting, simply due to its potential. The 3rd bottle at our table tasted very like wine B (to Jim, Orlando(?), and me at least). Wine C was just simple, plain, thin, and not much flavors at all.

Now wine B was Pichon Lalande, then I see why it was a controversial wine. It didn't taste anything close to the one I did before, which was nice but simple (very simple compared to the chateau 's normal standard). I did buy the idea that some bottles were flawed while others great(normal) from the same wine in the same vintage. Not sure what happened. In the past, maybe there wasn't such thing as a big enough tank in some chateaux to mix all barrels before bottling, so bottling from different barrels resulted in different bottles?

Werner

[aimeedogdogdog]

Question for Ed:
Did you reveal all 2 bottles of the same wine? Or someone else did it to the second bottle?

I went back to the table of the blind tasting wines later, and saw all revealed.

Werner

[JimHow]

So let's see...
If it weren't for the damaged bottles of '89 Lynch, James Suckling would be right:
1989 is better!

[Comte Flaneur]

I was confused by the blind tasting and found the results difficult to fathom, nor reconcile with my experience with these wines.

My take

A was the best wine and tasted like Pichon Baron; B was the weakest wine and was relatively easy to pick as Pichon Lalande (the only one I got right); C was raspingly tannic therefore had to be LLC; D was quite volutpuous therefore was probably Cos; E was californian fruity the way I remembered Lynch Bages.

I could not beleive the results, especially D being LLC - that is illogical captain - but still blind tastings are great levelers and these bottles are 20+ years old

[hm$]

There was no labeling mistake, but it is possible that at least 1 of the Lynch Bages was damaged. B was liked by many (not me) and the differential between 1st and 3rd was IIRC, less than 5 points out of 70+.

hm$

[Tom In DC]

B was the only wine I identified correctly, based on being much thinner and lighter than any of the others. I didn't see it as bad wine, just nowhere near the caliber of all the other wines and therefore, quite disappointing for Pichon-Lalande in a great vintage. The fact that the wine finished in the middle position suggests bottle variation to me, along the lines that one bottle might have been great and thus highly rated by half the room.

The wild card of not knowing which wine did not post made identifying all five much more difficult.

[stefan]

The B I drank was really nice. C was the only wine that was not very, very good. I assumed it was the much maligned P-L not because it tasted like bottles I have drunk previously, but just because I thought it would not fit in a group with the other wines.