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Château Haut Brion 295,00 EUR
 Product No.: 13483
Château Haut Brion
Vintage: 1986
Size: Bt
Region: Bordeaux
Price: 295,00 EUR
Short Comment: Graves
Comment about the wine:
A curious wine! It had an overpowering smell of burned rubber that over the years has slowly disappeared. When asking Jean-Bernard Delmas, the administrator, about this he insisted that it was the terroir with its minerallity coming through and with decanting and time it would disappear. He has been proven right and it is a wine that is now starting to show its greatness. Not a wine for lovers of fruit-driven powerwines - but then Haut Brion never is. Great complexity. The Swiss wine critic René Gabriel gives it 19 out of 20 points in his book "Bordeaux Total".
Comment about the vintage:
A hard winter and a cool spring was being followed by a very warm and dry summer. There were some violent outbursts of rain in the second half of september, mainly falling on Graves, St. Emilion and Pomerol. The harvest was from then on completed under ideal conditions. Again a huge amount of wine was produced,and most disappointments in this vintage are to be found where the wines were diluted by too high yields, too little selection of vats, and grapes swollen by the rains (mostly merlot) which were harvested too soon after the rains (mainly on the right bank and in Graves). This is a cabernet rather than a merlot-vintage. I can’t remember ever having tasted such a tannic vintage in it’s youth and it has taken very long for the wines to start being drinkable. I have never lost faith in this vintage as I always felt there was plenty of ripe, sweet concentrated fruit hidden behind the tannins and the rather high acidity. I took part in a major tasting in 1998 and found that the wines are now starting to show their beauty. The best wines come from Médoc where 1986 will be rated as one of the truly great, classic vintages. The superstars of the vintage are Lafite, Mouton, Margaux, Latour and Las Cases. The most undervalued wines are Léoville Poyferré und Haut Batailley who both show very well, also very good are Rauzan Ségla, Lagrange, Pape Clément, Cos, Montrose, both Pichons, Lynch Bages and Grand Puy Lacoste. Haut Brion and La Mission suffered when young from an unpleasant smell of burnt rubber, but this smell has now disappeared and both wines are very complex great wines. I find that the prices for this vintage are still very fair.