Stand and Deliver: 2001 Sauternes
BY NEAL MARTIN |
I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey and Moonraker when I was about eight years old. It was clear which was the cinematic masterpiece: Moonraker, obvs. The 1979 Bond outing stars Roger Moore armed with his Walther PPK and hilarious one-liners, features a bevy of beautiful women and a seven-foot baddie with metal teeth, and culminates with an epic laser battle in outer space.
It’s everything you want from a movie. What did Kubrick offer? Grunting apes lobbing a bone into space, an onboard computer named HAL that just needed Control+Alt+Delete to remedy its murderous inclinations, and a nonsensical ending that doesn’t feature a single laser or massive explosion. People laud the film for predicting the future in terms of technology, aeronautical engineering and so forth. But Kubrick failed to foresee that 2001 would yield a fecund vintage in Sauternes.
I remember tasting the nobly affected Sauternes at primeur. There was a buzz around them. The 2001 dry reds were initially viewed as inferior counterparts to the 2000s, but the 2001 vintage was redeemed by sensational sweet wines crowned by an imperious 2001 Yquem. That wine demanded 100-point scores and eulogies lest you be ridiculed by fellow wine writers and banished from Sauternes for eternity.
Twenty years on, this is an opportune moment to reassess the 2001 Sauternes to see how they are shaping up, not least because I have always been more cautious in my adulation. Did I underestimate them? Was I being mean? Was my judgment of wine no better than my judgment of film? It was time to find out. Together with Bill Blatch, patron saint of Sauternes, I undertook a horizontal tasting in the region during my stay in June 2021.
The Growing Season
