A Century of Bordeaux: The Twos 

BY NEAL MARTIN | SEPTEMBER 27, 2022

I like to take things to extremes. Life’s a bit boring otherwise. I could easily publish a common or garden Ten-Year-On report to see how the 2012s are shaping up. But why limit yourself?

How about those overlooked 2002s or derided 1992s?

Do the 1982s meet expectations or are cracks appearing in their gilded reputation?

Are the 1972s fermented dishwater?

Is 1962 the dark horse of the sixties, likewise 1952 in the fifties?

Was it even possible to make decent wine in 1942 occupied France?

Have I finally tasted a wine from the 1932 vintage? (Don’t get your hopes up)

What does a century-old 1922 taste like?

Have the 1912s finally reached their drinking window?

This article attempts to answer all these questions via the only way possible: not by bunging the question into a search engine, but tasting the wines. This is essentially an amalgam of several hypothetical standalone articles and continues a tradition that I introduced to Vinous in 2018 (see here for the “eights” and here for the “nines”). Having missed the “zero” and “ones” because of COVID, the “Century of…” series returns with the twos.

The bulk of my notes derive from the annual Ten-Year-On tasting with the Southwold group last February: a two-day blind tasting of around 150 wines. Hot on its tail came another 2012 horizontal tasting, this time organised by merchants Bordeaux Index, and was made up of a smaller number of sighted wines where I was afforded more time to examine each one. The overlap was useful in being able to compare like-for-like under different conditions, and tasting notes state from which one they derive. In instances where there was bottle difference, I publish two separate tasting notes (e.g. Haut-Brion).