Special days demand - for wine lovers - special wines. Christmas, New Year's Eve, New Year are such days. I usually take an "insider tip" out of the cellar, something that can be or promises to be a special experience; something that made a big impression on me at some point and therefore ended up in my cellar. Such special days in the calendar are "sacred" enough for me not to "just" get an expensive wine out of the cellar, which is rated (and priced) especially high according to common evaluation. For me, the love of wine is much more important than the ranking among the top dogs. This is especially true for wine regions with (too) high prestige value like Burgundy or the Bordelais. That's why on such days we often have "small", less well-known (or even unknown) names, but exciting, surprising, unusual, even unique wine experiences.
On this New Year's Eve, everything was quite different. We returned from a wonderful excursion into the world of Nativity Christmas (Estavayer-le-Lac), chilled and shaken. The - more or less - traditional New Year's Eve menu had not been prepared and certainly not a New Year's Eve wine list. So I reached - in the well-locked, "precious" corner - where the more expensive wines are stored - for a bottle, almost indiscriminately, only the vintage was important to me, not too old, not too young - maybe just right, ready to drink or even at a first peak.
I discovered (or at night) this Margaux 1999, for me one of the calmest, most balanced, most detached great wines of the Bordelais. In general, but also in certain vintages (which are very often not identical with the so-called "great vintages"). 1999 is such a vintage. Parker: "...1999 can be summarised as an excessively wet and unusually hot year that produced few captivating wines." At its highest, Parker has only rated four wines (from the Bordelais) at 95/100 points this year. Margaux is not among them - it scored "only" 94 points: "It is an archetypal Château Margaux with richness, finesse, balance and evenness." To which I would add: Qualities that do not exactly delight Parker (see ratings).
But they delight me. This Margaux 1999 was one of the best wines I have drunk in the past year, precisely because of these qualities (already identified by Parker 13 years ago). Soft, ripe, harmonious, persistent... What more can one add? Quite simply: a great, a great wine. Now - I think - probably at its first peak.
And now, almost inevitably, comes the discussion about the price, because wines (in the Bordelais) have long since been defined not by their quality, but by their price (the two sometimes have something to do with each other, but by no means always!) In the subscription, the '99 was offered at 160 CHF; the much higher-rated 2000 (100 Parker points), on the other hand, cost around 450 CHF. And today? Margaux 1999 can now be bought for 400 CHF, Margaux 2000 for about 900 CHF. A question for all the price fetishists (and profiteers). Which of the two wines has gained more in the last 10 or 12 years? A purely commercial calculation, for many (who do not reckon with such prices for wine) an absurd discussion. For me, an unworthy one.
I simply drank a great wine yesterday (no matter how much it once cost and/or how much it costs today), no matter whether it is the only one in my cellar or one of many, no matter whether I afford wines (at this price level) or not, no matter whether their value will rise or fall, no matter... I am quite simply happy to have such a wine - on the last day of the year - in my glass.