Bordeaux 2005 retrospective: 36 wines tasted

A wine writer often depends on the kindness of generous friends to do his job effectively. While it is true that we travel to wine regions (some of us, incessantly) to taste new vintages, it isn’t easy to form a definitive opinion at such an early stage.

The uncertainty is particularly keen in Bordeaux, where one frequently tastes cask samples selected by a winemaker and unfinished wines. But there are also opportunities to taste wines a bit later in their life.

See all 37 Bordeaux 2005 notes and scores from this tasting

The Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux organises tastings of young wines in cities throughout the world as are they are about to ship to the market. The Institute of Masters of Wine also hold tastings in London and California four years after the vintage. Even at this point, however, the wines are very youthful.

The happy few will taste older vintages with the auction houses, but forums for tasting a full retrospective of mature Bordeaux are few indeed. For this, one must rely on passionate collectors to offer bottles carefully stored in their cellars.

One such collector is the indefatigable Mark Taylor of Atlanta, Georgia, who has for years arranged tastings there for his fellow wine lovers and select visitors from out of town.

Taylor, an experienced wine collector, has a deep knowledge of Bordeaux and can even help you get it out of the bottle since he invented a corkscrew called The Durand that is specifically designed to open old bottles of wine.

Bordeaux 2005 retrospective: The format

Some of Mark’s tastings are verticals of the great châteaux, while others are horizontal surveys of a particular vintage. We had scheduled a retrospective of the 2005 vintage 15 years later for last spring (2020), but the pandemic interfered. It was rescheduled for June of this year.

Wines are tasted partially blind – or half-blind – in flights of six. We know the wines that comprise the line-up of each flight, but we do not know their order. Tasters take turns commenting on the wines, and everyone ranks them.

Before concluding, we vote to tally the group preference for each wine which invariably produces interesting results.

In any blind (or half-blind) tasting, humility is an absolute requirement. Legendary taster and wine trade veteran Harry Waugh is reported to have responded to the question, ‘Have you ever mistaken a Bordeaux for a Burgundy?’ with the pithy response, ‘Not since lunch’.

I often find my preconceived notions about a wine destroyed by blind tasting. It was a blind tasting with Mark Taylor that changed my opinion of the 2003 vintage in Bordeaux. Would this tasting change my opinion of 2005?

Bordeaux 2005 vintage conditions

The 2005 vintage provided textbook growing conditions from start to finish, with very sunny days that were warm but not hot. Drought combined with the sunshine produced tiny berries and very concentrated fruit. Night-time temperatures remained cool, and the lack of excessive heat meant the harvest could be timed for optimal tannin ripeness.

Picking began generally in the second week of September and continued well into October. The result was well-coloured wines of ripeness and structure but without bitterness.

Opinions in the trade were very favourable early on, even ecstatic. The wines sold for what were considered at the time very high prices. Some, however, have felt in recent years that the wines may not have completely lived up to their promise: certain tasters fear that the dry conditions produced skins so thick and tannins so fierce that they would forever outpace the fruit of the vintage and that the wines would never show the lush generosity that one expected from the reputed ‘vintage of the century’.

The verdict

My verdict can be found in the tasting notes that follow below. There were wines that seemed overly tannic and lacking in generosity, even nearly 16 years after the vintage. Others on the Merlot-dominated Right Bank seemed to have suffered an excess of maturity, showing a baked quality and very high alcohol levels (which approached 15% for some properties). Such characteristics can be found, however, in almost any modern ‘global warming’ vintage.

What I found, in general, is that the Bordeaux 2005 wines are evolving slowly but that the best of them are starting to show well now and exhibit the reserves to age for decades to come.

The prices, in retrospect, seem justified, perhaps even reasonable. Most of the wines are readily available today in the auction market. Prices for collectible Bordeaux exploded in the first few years following the financial crisis of late 2008. 2011 saw a dramatic market correction but prices since 2013 have been slowly rising again and most wines seem to be selling at a reasonable premium to their en primeur prices. It’s never too late to stock up!

See the top-scoring wines from this Bordeaux 2005 retrospective

The following wines all scored 93 points or above

See all 37 Bordeaux 2005 notes and scores from this tasting

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