Bordeaux 2005: 23 top wines tasted two decades on

In the spring of 2006, the wine world was a very different place; the insatiable demand for Burgundy was barely a twinkle in the milkman’s eye, Bordeaux was the undisputed deity of the wine world, and the entire known wine universe was ruled by one Robert M. Parker Jr.

History

When ‘Bob Parker’ released his first report on the 2005 vintage, titled; ‘Is 2005 the perfect vintage?’, ahead of the much-awaited En Primeur campaign, lovers of fine wine across the globe frantically contacted their bank managers to lay hands on any and everything that came their way.

Of course, the campaign was a roaring success, even with the relatively lofty prices, but there came a twist… when the great man, who had fuelled massive hype and demand through his comments, released his ‘in-bottle’ review, all and sundry were flabbergasted to read that there were only two ‘perfect’ 100 point scores from the hundreds reviewed.

He went on to qualify that ‘the perfect vintage’ referred, not necessarily to the absolute highs, but the exceptional median quality and homogeneity present, left and right, from top to bottom and everywhere in between.

In more recent years we have seen similar comments made about 2009, 2010, 2015, 2016 and 2022. As a great château owner once joked: ‘We don’t have bad vintages in Bordeaux. We have good vintages, great vintages and vintage of the century… but we can only use that every five years’.

The question on every Bordeaux lover’s lips is: ‘Where does 2005 sit in the pantheon of ‘vintages of the century?’ that are already so numerous in the first three decades of the new millennium.

Notes and scores for 23 Bordeaux wines from 2005 below

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