Anson: Tasting 100 years of Château Talbot wines

Starting with a 1919 vintage that is still holding its own and including a 1945 wine that remains 'full of flavour', Jane Anson has tasted a wine from each decade of Cordier family ownership at this St-Julien estate...

A Decanter reader asked me a few months ago about why the tasting notes for younger Bordeaux wines often display a narrower drinking window than the older ones.

It was an interesting question, and the answer I gave was perhaps not very satisfying, but true nonetheless.I said it probably stems from not wanting to give a drinking window for a young wine that is so wide as to render it meaningless.

The windows supplied for the younger wines are reflective of when they will be ready to begin drinking but will still have retained the plumpest fruit and be firmly on the plateau of drinking for most of us.

Scroll down to see Jane Anson’s Château Talbot tasting notes and scores

But in truth, Bordeaux often surpasses expectations of ageing, and many times you open a wine that is at its peak and clearly still stubbornly refusing to go away; or one that should be way past it and yet still giving huge pleasure even if the flavours are tertiary, with undergrowth, walnut and soft tobacco taking the place of the cassis fruits.

Even when the fruit has long been chased away, it’s hard to discount the pleasure that can be found in taffy, truffle and saffron spices.

I kept thinking about this as I was tasting through the 100 years of Château Talbot. It made a mockery, as verticals of this size often do, of how we normally approach Bordeaux, with our careful calibrations of a point here, a point there, and of a confident sweep of a drinking window.

These wines defied our windows and wrote their own rules. Any wine that can age like this and give such pleasure should be celebrated, independent of scores and timescales.

The Cordier family, under Désiré Cordier, bought Château Talbot in 1918, and today it is run by Nancy Bignon-Cordier and Jean-Paul Bignon. It is an estate that is often seen as steady-as-she-goes in the St-Julien firmament (although we are speaking relatively here); an 1855 4th Growth in an appellation where there is a clutch of more prestigious 2nd Growths.

And yet the consistency displayed here was remarkable, without a trace of heat in any vintage, beautiful balance and tons of St-Julien signature elegance and complexity. It was without question a wonderful way to see not only the evolution of Talbot, but also to note also its admirable consistency.

The estate picked one wine to show from each decade since the family arrived (with two others opened over lunch from the 1940s and 1980s), and served them slowly, one at a time, to allow for the story to unfold slowly with our full concentration.

We started out with a wine bottled in 1919, from the year that the Treaty of Versailles marked the final end of World War One, passed through the end of World War Two and the War in Algeria, and finished up a bottle that is just now approaching its 10th birthday with the 2010, the year of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and the Affordable Care Act was passed into law by President Barack Obama.

The wines gave us a window into each of those moments in history.

What a memorable way to finish 2018.

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