1994 Château Léoville Barton, Saint Julien: not as exciting as we hoped

1994 Château Léoville Barton

Unfortunately, I don’t really have any friends with ready-to-drink cellars filled with red Bordeaux who are clamoring to invite us over for some tasting. (If in fact you are out there, I wouldn’t mind an invite soon!) My parents aren’t really big wine drinkers, but when they do, their tastes run toward Tuscany. Too bad. How will I ever decide whether or not I like Bordeaux? Recently I read somewhere that the best thing to do is to buy an older bottle from a reputable wine merchant and try it out. So today marks my first stab in that direction.

I got this bottle of 1994 Château Léoville Barton from K&L Wines in San Francisco. To me it was a considerable splurge for a random bottle of wine, costing about 80 bucks. I read now on the K&L web site that Robert Parker and Wine Spectator both thought that the wine had a numerical rating of 90, if that means anything to anyone. All of the critics think that it should be ready to drink now.

The wine was an opaque dark purple with aromas of cedar and Hegui rather unflatteringly thought the scent of “natural tobacco bug repellant to use on collard green plants.” This had medium body with a very long finish. We noted metallic notes, red fruit and a lot of refined tannin. Hegui concluded after a few tastes, “It’s not my cup of tea.” In fact, he refused to drink more and I was forced to open another bottle of 2009 Saint Cosme Côtes du Rhône, which remains a crowd pleaser at my house. I actually liked the Bordeaux.

Stephen Brook, in his book, Bordeaux: Medoc & Graves, characterizes the reds from the 1994 vintage as “dark, quite rich, and tannic: but they mostly lacked finesse and flair.” He goes on to conclude that 1994 is “another vintage that failed to meet its early promise.” He specifically writes that the 1993 and 1994 Léoville Barton are “not bad, but neither are they exciting or that distinctive.” Hmm…

I didn’t know any of this before buying the wine. I hadn’t even read what was on the K&L site, though by the numbers and the general summary there, I would probably have done the same and gotten the bottle. Really, I just picked it up having ordered some 2008 and 2009 Léoville Barton as futures. I thought that this might give me a hint about what to expect in two decades when those wines are ready to taste. Now I wonder if they will fail to meet their early promise, too, and won’t be that exciting or distinctive? Gosh, I hope not!

So much for early ratings and it’s back to the drawing board with Bordeaux!