Wine Review: 2005 Chateau Belrose Grand vin de Bordeaux

From Intervals

So, I opened up this bottle of Bordeaux that I paid a fair $12 US for, and didn’t have a lot of expectations.  Yes, it was an 05…which gives it some merit; but let’s be honest: we’ve all had our share of mediocre 2005 Bordeaux from time to time.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the vintage: I’ve read Parker; I know…I know 05 was a fantastic year, sure, great, fine.

This is the first wine article I’ve written for Intervals; so I want to get it right and I DON’T want to bore you with the typical “aged French oak barrel notes of malolactic fermentation, blah-dee-blah”.  I just want to tell you what I think of the wine, finish my glass and go back to the Red Sox game.

So let’s cut to the chase: I go by the classic Robert E. Parker Jr. method of evaluation.  I know that other wine nuts have their own methods of grading wine; and I’m sure they work well…but the 100 point system set up by Parker is fairly universal: like it or not.

So, I’ll judge a wine by it’s color, with a score of 1 through 10.  I’ll judge it’s nose (or smell) with a score of 1 through 30.  The taste and feel in the mouth (texture) is graded between 1 and 40 and finally the overall impression of the wine is scored between 1 and 20.

Got that?  Let’s begin.

Now, when I first opened up the 05 Chateau Belrose I was a little worried at the rusty blood red color it had to it.  I always check the color in a brightly lit room with a piece white printer paper held behind the glass (a Riedel by the way, a jelly jar is fine but I’m not an expert at this wine tasting thing, so I need all the help I can get).  For a Bordeaux, rust isn’t want you want for it’s color, so I was going to give it a grade of 4 until I noticed that there was sediment on the side of the bottle.  This had accumulated as the bottle had been stored on it’s side…so I let the glass of wine sit a bit…and sure enough, some sediment started to settle in the glass, and the color changed to a deep, dark claret! I checked it against the printer paper, held it to the light and gave it a grade of 8.

Next, the all important nose.  I’m really bad when it comes to this, so I always have to do two things to get the full scent of a wine: (1) I give the glass a good swirl and (2) I take two or three good snorts of the wine, smelling deeply thricely in order to fill my cranium with as much wine gas as possible. I got the smell of granite at first, a very light breeze of rocks in the Quincy quarries near where I grew up.  This was not a fruit bomb, which means it was light on the Cab Franc and Malbec. I knew right away that this was going to have to open up a bit before it could be enjoyed.  I knew it had potential, but was kinda bummed out that it didn’t do the jumping cherry dance in the nostrils!  Burned blueberries, I got that on the first wiff as well…and something like grapefruit: which really makes no sense, but that’s what I got.  I scored it 19 out of 30.

Next up: the mouth, and that’s when I realized I was dealing with Merlot (unconfirmed, but the tannis were dry on the finish).  That’s okay, I like Merlot and I understand it’s a major component in Bordeaux, but you’d think they’d add some Cab Franc to put some balance to it.  I’m not saying that Chateau Belrose isn’t balanced, I’m just saying that I wasn’t excited at this point, as I usually am with Bordeaux.

Have I mentioned that I’m a Bordeaux freak?  No?  I’ll have to explain that to you in some future blog post.  For now, let’s return to my review.

So, the mouth: it was very smooth and what the snoots call “velvety” on the tongue, which means that it didn’t’ burn my mouth and had a lot of good flavor…I like to do this slurping thing, to get some of the evaporated wine in my mouth back up to my nose (from within my mouth).  This helps me taste the wine better.  THIS was outstanding! Ahhhh, now this is what I was hoping for.  Sweet cherry notes and hints of dark roast coffee (not espresso mind you, but that dark Columbian coffee you sometimes have at Starbucks) and just a little bit of chocolate, like someone dropped a Hershey bar in the barrel, but then fished it out moments later.  I liked what I was tasting, and the finish was great: tannic dry but not too strong and notes of spicy pepper at the end…reminding me of mole sauce.  I scored it a 34 on the palate.

Finally the overall impression.  I gave it a 16 because this wine seemed like it had potential and I probably should have held onto it.  SO, the total came to 8+19+34+16=77.

And that would be the end of my story, except that I decided to decant the bottle to let it open up a bit…and open up it did!  YEE-IKES, that paltry nose score of 19 got a major boost once I retasted it when it opened up, suddenly I’m getting watermelon, cherry “Yubba Bubba Bubble Bum” and this smoky, leather aroma that just wasn’t there when I uncorked the bottle!  I rescored this sucker a solid 26 on the nose, jacked up the palate score to 37 and gave the overall score an 18 for a new updated total of 89.

The 2005 Chateau Belrose Bordeaux, a complex wine that needs to open up (give it about 40 minutes).  I highly recommend this one!

Salute!

- Steve