1971 Latour & 1971 Les Forts de Latour

BY NEAL MARTIN | JULY 08, 2024

Wine is often a moving target. The greatest tend to be shape-shifters in the glass. Just when you think you’ve got a wine pinned down, it mutates into something different, and you end up crossing out words in your carefully written note. It’s like a child toying with you, playing peek-a-boo. Now you see me…now you don’t. This brings me to this pair of wines served completely blind by Frédéric Engerer at the château. (I should preface this by saying that he does not only pour the estate’s wines, and in fact, these were mixed with a third bottle from the Right Bank.) That said, we were clearly playing “home,” not “away,” for the first pair: the one on the left was better than the one on the right. After what felt like hours trying to guess the vintage, it was revealed as 1971. However, I had basically spent the entire time claiming that the Deuxième Vin on the left was superior to the Grand Vin on the right, the 1971 Latour generally considered one of the few genuinely successful wines on the Left Bank. Here’s the thing. Even after the wines were revealed, I was not the only person to favor the Les Forts de Latour, but with about half an hour of the evening left, it was as if a hidden switch was flicked. The Grand Vin soared so that soon, the Les Forts de Latour was in its rear-view mirror. The mercurial nature is part of our fascination with great wine, which makes writing notes more difficult than it already is, but anyway…