les hauts de pontet paudillac 1983

[Kcwhippet]

People who are seriously into wine and those in the business can be generally described as students of agriculture, meteorology and even history. We have an idea how a grape vine and its fruits grow - some of us are more knowledgeable than others, but the more one learns about wine, the more you find you know about grapes themselves. Along the same line, the more one learns about wine, the more you realize how weather events dramatically affect the growth and maturity of grapes. As for history, it really does repeat itself and we have learned that when certain weather events occur, the grapes will grow and mature a certain way and the resulting wine will generally turn out predictably. What that boils down to is that when the weather sucks, the wine will not be as good for that year as in years the weather is beautiful, as far as the needs of the grape are concerned. Well, in Bordeaux in 1983 the weather sucked. It had a cold, wet, bleak spring that warmed up late, and delayed bud break, which shortens the growing season. June and July were warm and dry, with not much rain, so the grapes were growing slowly and their size was small. August was muggy and humid which caused a lot of rot and mildew in the grapes bunches, thus lowering the size of the crop. It rained around harvest which caused the berries to swell with water and dilute the fruit's concentration. With very good vineyard practices and good timing at harvest, it's possible to make decent wine in bad years, and very few wineries in Bordeaux managed that in 1983. Les Hauts de Pntet was not one of them. Back in early 1998, Clive Coates tasted a lot of Bordeaux wines and published his tasting notes. About the 1983 wines in general he said they were not fresh, they lacked grip, they were deficient in vigor, and they were short on the palate. He named about ten, out of the hundreds of Bordeaux wines, that were of sufficient quality to warrant drinking past that date. Les Hauts de Pontet was not one of those wines. That's how we know 1983 was a "bad" year, and so would anyone who knows enough about wine to research 1983 to find out what to offer you for your wine. I'll offer $15 and you pay for shipping.