1998 Les Forts de Latour

Latour resembled a construction site this spring, as a major renovation project was in full swing. As this is a classic Bordeaux estate, with the chateau and winemaking facility located in the center of the vines, the only way to expand the physical plant was to dig down a level. "We're redoing the vat room, the bottling line, everything," said estate manager Frederic Engerer. "All the changes are aimed at allowing us to vinify smaller lots and to make wine more efficiently." Latour has an outstanding 2000 vintage in the works, a wine that, in the words of Engerer, "will please English nostalgics who like the austere stuff but which also has the smooth structure and polished tannins that today market obviously appreciates." In fact, this is a wine with an unusual balance for the vintage: the pH of 3.7 is normal, but the acidity level (4.1 grams per liter) was the highest figure I heard during my spring tour of the Bordeaux region. The old cabernet vines reached 12+% potential alcohol, which is quite rare, and polyphenol levels were very high. "We considered using 6% press wine until two weeks ago, but the blend we decided on has just 3% [the '99, in comparison, includes 15%]. We already had a structured, muscular wine, and we risked getting a dryness at the end if we included more press wine." Among the other changes instituted by Engerer since he took over direction of Latour in 1999 has been a reduction in the percentage of new oak, to 90% in 1999 and 85% in 2000. "We're looking for more precision of fruit and more focused tannins," he explained.

Gerant Frederic Engerer, recently joined by new technical director Frederic Ardouin, who was previously vineyard manager, took a number of steps to maximize quality at this great first growth for the 1999 vintage. He has sharply reduced crop levels in the estate's young vines and has moved to stricter sorting of fruit. The average yield in '99 was just 39 hectoliters per hectare, according to Engerer, and just 25 in the parcels that went into the grand vin. Just as important, Engerer now pays much more attention to the press wine. "Beginning in '99, we separate the first and second press for each vat and put them in casks," Engerer explained. "Previously we would automatically use the press wine from our best parcels but now that's not necessarily the case. It is possible that a particular lot has already given everything it has during extraction, and that the press wine would have nothing to add to the wine." Some of the early-picked merlot in '99 reached a never-before-seen 14% natural alcohol but lacked spine, added Engerer, an observation I heard repeatedly throughout the Bordeaux vignoble. Even the cabernet came in at an unusually strong 12.5% potential alcohol, more than a degree higher than the '98. No chaptalization was done in '99.

"Our 1998 has that old classic Latour masculinity," says director Christian Le Sommer, who compared it to the 1970 at a similar stage. The estate brought in a good portion of its merlot under dry conditions, with ripe sugars in the 12.5% range, then harvested cabernet sauvignon into early October, with potential alcohol of around 10.8%-"average for our terroir," according to Le Sommer. "Here 11% is a great vintage." Polyphenol levels were high; some cuvees had huge tannins in '98, even more than in '90.