A Last StEm Fling and the Journey Home

A panning shot on the drive of La Mission Haut Brion, taken on Thursday morning.

Back home at last and pondering a week of interesting tasting and an assessment of a vintage the qualities of which are far from clear cut.

My last morning, I rose and breakfasted quickly and set off for St Emilion, there to taste the wines of Jonthan Malthus i.e. Châteaux Teyssier, Laforge, as well as the seniors: Le Carré, Asteries, Vieux-Château-Mazerat and Le Dôme. Good wines here and a fascinating look at St Emilion terroir, each vineyard having slightly varying soils and sub-soils. Le Dôme, incidentally, at 80% contains the highest proportion of Cabernet Franc of all the wines of Bordeaux. Great elegance here, this year.

An hour on fronm Château Teyssier, Bergerac airport, a pre-fab shed of a place on which they appear to have been working for years. A jolly-plane flight back to England, an hour of driving and I was home, dazzled and yet not unperplexed at what I had tasted over the week of my Bordeaux sojourn. Fuller thoughts will be forthcoming in the near future!