16 Vintages of La Conseillante @ the Embassy of France in DC

[Winona Chief]

Oh what to do on the odd Tuesday night (November 14) in DC. Drop into the French Embassy and enjoy 4 different Champagnes, 16 vintages of Chateau La Conseillante and some Sauternes to go with a wonderful dinner. Marcus and I successfully crashed the head table to sit with event organizer, Panos Kakaviatos and Conseillante wine maker, Marielle Cazaux.

As usual, I took no notes - maybe Marcus did. I think the very young 2005 and 2010 showed the best with great intensity. The 2009 and 2015 were very good but a bit on the fruity side. I thought the excellent 1998 and 2000 were at the very beginning of their drinking windows. The 1990 was in a good place and fully mature. A lot of wonderful wines.

You can find Kevin Shin's take on the evening at:
https://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/v ... =155884

Chris Bublitz

[AlohaArtakaHoundsong]

I haven't done any tastings of consequence but I can imagine verticals being the most instructive, particularly where the bottles are all sourced from (presumably) the chateau.

[Nicklasss]

Splendid. La Conseillante is a great Pomerol. Each vintage I had has been fabulous. The 2005 and 2010 look great.

Nic

[JimHow]

I have no Conseillante in my cellar.
I intend to get one bottle each of the 2016 Conseillante, Figeac, Baron, and Comtesse, those will be my expensive purchases from 2016. The rest will be the usual suspects: Leoville Barton, Giscours, Meyney, Chasse Spleen, Sociando, Brane Cantenac, Cantemerle, Barde Haut, etc., etc.

[DavidG]

I’m a fan. Sounds like an awesome event.

[Comte Flaneur]

Gosh I love this estate.

When I was in the States in September I pulled out a few bottles from Manhattan Wine Company - who by the way have been brilliant since I deposited my US-based wines with them seven years ago - including a 2004 Conseillante, which I purchased for $25, I kid you not.

This wine is still backward and in my opinion is not a great Conseillante. It lacks generosity and effortless charm, two hallmarks of great Conseillante. This bottle after an appropriate restating period after its transatlantic crossing delivered little pleasure.

I had a case of this sitting in bond and sold it for £850 and swapped into a case of 2006. I am really annoyed with myself for not snagging a case of the 2005, but that particular horse has bolted.

I can console myself by the knowledge that I also have cases of 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2016 waiting in the wings. But the 2001 was another one that I missed - at least I have 2001 Figeac.

[marcs]

This was an incredible event, among my top five or ten wine nights ever (and I've had some good ones!). I really should have posted here on it, sorry. Reproducing below my post from Kevin Shin's thread on WB that is linked above:

https://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/vi ... 4#p2617016

Before I even get to the wines, as Keith and Kevin said, this was another brilliant showing from Panos Kakaviatos. He somehow makes it look easy to put together these incredible verticals and serve them perfectly over a great dinner. This dinner stood out even by Panos standards, both due to the terrific level of quality at Conseillante, the great setting at the French Embassy, and also Marielle Cazaux who besides being knowledgeable is a really warm, engaging, and down to earth person.

Someone above said that Conseillante is a consistent producer with "not much variation" from vintage to vintage. I wouldn't say that's true; it's more that Conseillante has no bad vintages. This vertical included plenty of less celebrated and even "off" vintages like 1999, 2003 (on the right bank), 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2012. But not a single one was anything less than a good wine. The quality standard was clearly very high (and unfortunately prices are rising to match). At the same time, there was I thought quite a lot of vintage variation. The 2005 (my WOTN) was a towering, great wine that IMO stood far above vintages like 2003 or 2008, and even some of the very good vintages in the lineup like 2004/2006/2012 or even 2000. Kevin's notes above are very good but I think his scores may not vary quite enough to express the quality range at least as I experienced it. The heights in this lineup were so high that very good wines, like e.g. the 1999 and 2004, were hard to pay attention to given some of the tremendous wines that surrounded them.

In terms of general impressions of Conseillante, what really stood out to me was a certain lightness and delicate touch to these wines, even in years where they were expressing considerable power. Years like 2005, 2009, 2010 had tremendous depth but still felt light on the palate. One thing I appreciated about this was that in "warm" vintages like 1990, 2009, 2015 the wines had a beautiful caramel/brown sugar sweetness without being in any way cloying or syrupy in the slightest. However, one downside to me was that in some of the more "tannic" years there was a bit of a sharp metallic edge to the finish for me, as if the wine did not have enough weight to buffer the tannins. That is probably just a matter of my palate as opposed to others, but for me it made e.g. the 2010 not as enjoyable right now as the 2009 or even the 2015. It led me to downgrade the 2000, 2008, and 2010 somewhat compared to some of the other vintages. They were just a little edgy and harsh for me in the finish, especially the 2008. But for me, 2005 was the vintage that really brought it all together -- that perfectly ripe sweetness but also a deep, profound bottom note of black olive and dark coffee. Just fantastic intensity without the slightest harshness or edginess, especially after some time to warm up. Unfortunately, this wine is out of my price range, but I was very glad to have tasted it. It will age for decades but is very profound already and it would not be a waste to open now with proper decanting.

Some other vintages -- 2007 really stood out, and in a good way, for a certain green / vegetal quality that other wines did not have. But that quality really worked when combined with the typical Conseillante sweetness, it became more of a really nice tobacco-y impression. Major success for Conseillante in one of the toughest vintages of the last two decades. I really loved 2009, more than 2010, for its sweetness and great texture. 2010 may surpass 2009 in the long run but for now, at least for my tastes, the finish is too tannic and the midpalate has not "relaxed" to show all its depth. I also enjoyed 2015, which I think is going to end up being rather like 2009.

As far as 1990 goes, I had never tasted this wine before so have nothing to compare it to, and it is certainly showing tertiary notes and browning a bit. But I thought it was fantastic, perhaps my third favorite of the night after the 2005 and 2009. It had a wonderful complexity with lots of truffles and incense but the fruit was still evident. If "aging rapidly" means drink it up within the next five years, then I guess I might agree as it's hard to see it getting any better. But if it means that it is no longer a top quality wine then I would disagree as it was one of the highlights of the night for me.

By the way, Kevin gave a very good and accurate note on the 2003 above in saying that although there was good concentration, the wine left a "dull" impression and the fruit was flat. That to me is the 2003 vintage character, not excessive ripeness, but a failure to ripen properly in many cases and you could feel that here. At the same time it was a pretty good wine given the difficulties of the vintage on the right bank. For my taste the 2003 and 2008 were the worst wines in the lineup and I would still have been glad to have a bottle of either over dinner.

[marcs]

Gosh I love this estate.

When I was in the States in September I pulled out a few bottles from Manhattan Wine Company - who by the way have been brilliant since I deposited my US-based wines with them seven years ago - including a 2004 Conseillante, which I purchased for $25, I kid you not.

This wine is still backward and in my opinion is not a great Conseillante. It lacks generosity and effortless charm, two hallmarks of great Conseillante. This bottle after an appropriate restating period after its transatlantic crossing delivered little pleasure.

A slight disagreement, perhaps just of emphasis. Based just on my two experiences with this wine (a full bottle over dinner and a pour at the Embassy event) I would say the 2004 Conseillante is a very good wine. In particular, while I agree it lacks generosity compared to other vintages of Conseillante, it does have a whole lot of charm. It is a beautifully textured wine, really smooth and silky, and has a nice easygoing sweetness to it even if not that much depth. I do agree it is outshone by other Conseillante vintages, that came through in the Embassy vertical, but when I had it over dinner it was very nice.

With that said, you did well by trading up to the 2006 which even if the tannins are just slightly edgier today has a lot more richness and stuffing than 2004. 2006 clearly beat out 2004 when they were next to each other in this vertical.

[marcs]

For the tasting overall, not sure how much I have to add to the WB post reproduced above. I took a few notes but they are not too detailed.

I guess I would underline again what I said above about the lightness of touch of Conseillante. I wouldn't call it "Burgundian", I find that adjective rather annoying in the Bordeaux context, because, duh, it isn't made from Pinot and doesn't taste like Pinot. But it is surely among the Bordeaux producers that is most characterized by the quality of "power without weight". As I also said, I found the "solar" vintages (in this case, 1990, 2009, 2015) particularly charming as the wine expresses a beautiful sweetness without any cloying or syrupy heaviness or oppressive fig-ish or pruney fruit. It's more a brown sugar or caramel quality, adding incense and truffle notes with age. Conseillante fruit has a perfectly ripe blackberry quality to it, the lightest black fruit there is.

By the same token, though, I wasn't as fond of some of the more "structured" vintages as I expected to be. The tannins stuck out to me a bit, at times they had almost a metallic quality, and detracted from the lightness that is IMO typical of Conseillante at its best. This was true of the 2000, 2008, 2010, and. disappointingly, the 2014 (I say disappointingly since price-wise the 2014 is by far the best Conseillante deal on the market...I liked the 2015 a lot better than the 2014, which isn't good since it's about twice the price). Now, the 2000 and 2010 are still clearly excellent wines, I just felt like I was having less of the experience I go to Conseillante for. And frankly I felt like Conseillante doesn't handle tannin as well as a big left bank wine would.

The vintage that for me fully and completely integrated structural power and generosity of fruit was the 2005. That was easily my wine of the night. It just kept revealing layers on layers. A great wine and to me it stood out as superior even in a tremendous vertical like this, which is not at all easy -- typically the problem with these kind of verticals is that wines sort of blur into a generalized chateau style and individual years don't stand out. To give you a sense, while she was drinking the 2005 Marielle Cazaux (the new winemaker) kept repeating "c'est trop bon, c'est trop bon"...

In terms of "off vintages", I would rank them in the following rough order:

2001 -- stood out, it's not really an "off vintage" at all as I felt it was easily comparable or even perhaps superior to the 1998 and 2000. Very well rounded and with a deep, mouth filling finish that had a lot of both depth and complexity. Notes of aged complexity are emerging but I felt like this wine might still be better with five more years on it or a good decant, you can feel it is still "unfolding". Unfortunately the word is out about this wine and it is now priced like an "on" vintage. I have three bottles but should have scooped up more back when it was a relative bargain.

2006, 2012 -- a notch down from 2001 because they were just a touch clumsier and less complex. They had excellent sweetness and a lot of charm but lacked some undertone of savory complexity, and the finishes were slightly clipped compared to the best wines in the lineup. Still, really good and very Conseillante in character. Near miss to greatness vintages.

2007 -- depending on your taste you might rank this one close to 2006 and 2012, certainly it has a very unique quality. As I said above it has a vegetal quality but is still sweet and charming. My notes say spearmint, borderline between green pepper and tobacco. However, the lack of body in the year comes through on the finish which turns a bit sour. Just a very intriguing wine though, has the kind of complexity that would make it really fun to linger over at dinner. But unless you like green you're going to prefer 06/12/

2004 -- excellent texture, lacks depth of fruit.

2003 and 2008 -- my two least favorite of the whole lineup, and they were still good. 2008 was just too tannic and acidic for the "conseillante" quality to come through for me. Years like 2006 pulled it off because they had a lot of sweet fruit depth that 2008 just didn't seem to have. Could develop into something better but it's hard to tell. 2003 is very well described in Kevin Shin's note -- the fruit was "flat". It was a very solid wine but also somehow dull and lacking in sparkle. As I said above, this felt very 2003 to me, a vintage which to me is not a "solar" vintage marked by overripe fruit but instead a vintage where something went wrong with the ripening process due to excessive heat. Conseillante does great in your typical warm vintage but did at best OK here.

In terms of the "young" vintages -- 2014 and 2015 -- I always have a hard time predicting the evolution of young Bordeaux. But honestly the comparison of 2014-2015 to 2008-2009 seemed to come through in spades here. The 2015 was *easily* the best 2015 I've tasted, and was very reminiscent of a younger version of the 2009. You could drink it now, it's lush but balanced and beautiful already. The 2014 was edgier and harder to read, because the relative lack of fruit compared to 2015 meant the oak and acidity felt a lot more evident -- this is the typical problem I have with young Bordeaux. But it seemed possible that the '14 could go the way of the '08.