TN: Pieropan Soave '07, Can Camps Pedradura '04, Lafite '01

[Otto Nieminen]

• 2007 Pieropan Soave Classico - Italy, Veneto, Soave Classico (5/22/2009)
  12% abv; this was moved from the special order selection to the normal selection, and as a consequence the price also dropped from 16,76€ to 13,36€! Hurray for Alko! For once there is some good news from our usually pathetic monopoly! The wine is just as wonderful as I remember from last summer: very mineral scent, yellow and limpid fruit. It is fairly full bodied yet is still clear, precise and limpid with good, citrus-like acidity. It's not a profound wine like the Calvarino sometimes seems to me to be, but it is huge fun.
• 2004 Can Camps Penedès Pedradura - Spain, Catalunya, Penedès (5/22/2009)
  Full disclosure: the company I work for, for a couple hours a week, now imports this. If you feel it is inappropriate to post it here, do delete! Once again, I find this a very satisfying wine. It smells deliciously ripe yet it has a strong savoury, vegetal/earthy character to it so it isn't all about the fruit. It is like a Texier CdPape with a curious twist, yet the curious twist doesn't seem out of place at all. Sweet, ripe fruit, good structure, no sucrosity despite being sweetly fruity. Very nice wine with gladly no new oak aromas (though I was under the impression that a small percentage did see new oak!). Knowing that Marselan is a cross of Grenache and Cabernet Sauvignon, I can see the differences to these two grapes, but still the cross (at least in this wine) seems a very successful one where their seemingly vastly different personalities come together in a seamless whole.
• 2001 Château Lafite Rothschild - France, Bordeaux, Médoc, Pauillac (5/22/2009)
  C. 177€ (ouch!). A classic Pauillac profile of baked beans, wonderful savouryness, refreshing lift. Good tannins, ripe fruit, very refreshing and slightly herbaceous aftertaste. Classy but very young. It gladly has lost some of the overt oak and "modernness" that I saw in it earlier. Very nice!

Posted from CellarTracker

As classy as the Lafite obviously was, and though it was obviously young and impressive, am I a horrible person if I say that I enjoyed the other two wines more tonight? The Pieropan is great fun young; the Pedradura, too. The Lafite was great, but was all about the future whereas the others where about today. I haven't seen many positive views about the 2001 great growths, but I have generally found them impressive and classic in their potential.

[AlexR]

Otto,

Your wrote:

"As classy as the Lafite obviously was, and though it was obviously young and impressive, am I a horrible person if I say that I enjoyed the other two wines more tonight? "

Yes,
Alex

[ChrisW]

No, No, No!!!!

You are not a horrible person. Just a wise person who is not influenced by the label and judges the wine based on its intrinsic value. Given that you are obviously not influenced by the label, it would have only been even wiser not to open the lafite at this stage

Young first growths very often perform very poorly at blind tastings of young Bordeaux. Wines which are more expressive in their youth such as d' Aiguilhe, Fombrauge, La Tour Carnet, Pavie, Pape Clement etc. very often outperform the first growths in these tastings.

Once a year I attend a large tasting of a wine shop were 100+ wines from Bordeaux are to be tasted, amongst which several young first growths. I'm rarely impressed by their performance, but admire them often for their future potential. I've also tasted the Lafite 2001 twice and it is IMO indeed not a wine which should be drunk now for its current drinking pleasure. I once was so foolish to order a bottle of a lafite 1999 in a restaurant. I still have a sour arm from swirling it around, hoping that this would at some stage inspire it to release all its magic aromas. Of course it didn't and it stayed as tight as a drum.

Kindest regards,

ChrisW