Test of Endurance: Bordeaux 2014 Ten Years On

BY NEAL MARTIN | MARCH 19, 2024

My 15 minutes of fame began around midday. A strange female voice telephones from the Paris press office of the Daily Torygraph - the starting pistol for a surreal afternoon when every national newspaper craves an interview with yours truly. Soon, there’s a call every five minutes. My wife hollers up the stairs…

“The BBC’s on the phone.”

They want me to come into the studio, but there’s not enough time, so I’m transferred to a household name journalist and interviewed for that evening’s Six O’Clock News, the frivolous ‘…and finally’ to cheer up listeners after all the war and pestilence. I’ve barely put down the receiver when it’s the call I’ve been dreading…

“Hi. This is The Sun.”

How did this muck-raking tabloid obtain my number? Hacked? Should I call Prince Harry for advice? A spurned ex-girlfriend giving lurid details of our love life? A winemaker avenging a poor review? Once we establish that his knowledge of wine goes little beyond cheap beer, I agree to help him rustle up something witty to appeal to a readership that I suspect is unfamiliar with the double-Guyot pruning or biodynamics. The only stumbling block is a requested list of supermarket recommendations – not my specialty. After surviving that call and scooping up my daughter from infant school, I return home to find a stranger in a trench coat, armed with a Nikon weaponized with an enormous lens, loitering at the front door.

“You Neal Martin?” he says gruffly, breath stained with tobacco. “Been sent to take a photo for tomorrow’s piece in The Sun.”

We repair to the green outside my home. I pose within smelling distance of the dog waste bin. Later, I stubbornly refuse to listen to the Six O’Clock News, though I can tell I’m being aired by my daughters’ hysterical laughter. The Sun “exclusive” appears the following day, occupying the entire page seven under the headline: I hate wine snobs…I write my guide in McDonald’s. The first part is true, the second a misquote, but whatever, it’s a fun piece, even if my five wine recommendations are completely fabricated.

Why recount my 15 minutes of fame? Well, the previous evening, at a pre-organized press conference, sitting next to the abdicating king of wine criticism, Robert Parker announced that coverage of Bordeaux was being handed to some geezer from Essex who never even drank wine until he was twenty-five. First assignment? The 2014 Bordeaux vintage…

Time flies. It’s difficult to believe that a decade has already passed since my 17th en primeur. I was fortunate insofar that 2014 followed the woeful 2013s, so the only way was up. Hence, there was a veil of optimism that the wines were at least better than the previous three vintages, essentially a “useful” crop for merchants and consumers alike, inasmuch as they were decent wines at decent prices.

Between flights of the Southwold 10-Year-On tasting held at Farr Vintners