Once-in-a-Century Taste Testing of Latour, the ‘Dallas Cowboys of Wine’

In the long history of Bordeaux, one property stands out as a beacon of the region, a chateau so well known that its very name prompts wine lovers to swoon.

It is Chateau Latour and it is a property with a long, regal and in some ways mystifyingly low-key image. The wine of Latour is deep and brooding, intensely flavored and hard to evaluate when young because of the richness and depth.

Moreover, almost no house in all of Bordeaux has such an amazing track record for producing fine wine even in the worst of vintages as has Latour. And thus when Riverside wine lover Bipin Desai recently sent out invitations to a once-in-a-century tasting of a range of Latours dating back into the 1800s, the response was quick.

Held at three Los Angeles restaurants and spanning two dinners and a luncheon, Desai’s amazing event attracted wine lovers from afar, and clearly this was due to the reputation of the chateau for making great wine, year in and out.

At this point it is appropriate to point out that Latour, being one of the famed First Growth Bordeaux houses of France, gained its fame in part, ironically, by the greatness of the other First Growth wines, and from Latour’s comparison with them. Were it not for the brilliance in Chateaux Mouton-Rothschild, Lafite-Rothschild, Margaux and Haut-Brion, Latour would have nothing to which it might be compared and for which it is renowned.

The fact is that Latour is highly praised in part because it is among the darkest, deepest, most concentrated wines on the planet that still has the ability to charm the pants off you. Its First Growth cousins have their own attributes, and each has its champions, but Latour is sort of the Dallas Cowboys of the wine game: even in an off-year its fans love ‘em.

Latour is often compared with Lafite, its neighbor in Pauillac, in terms of quality. And comparing them is a sport unto itself. For my money, it was best stated by Hugh Johnson, the lyric author of dozens of wine books, who compared the properties in his Modern Encyclopedia of Wine. The text is poetry of a high level:

“The quality of each is set in relief by the very different qualities of the other. Lafite is a tenor; Latour a bass . . . Lafite is a dance; Latour a parade.”

I was unable to attend Desai’s Latour extravaganza, with wines dating back more than 120 years, though I did taste a few of the youngest wines. But I interviewed Alan Hare, president of Latour, and Christian Le Sommer, Latour’s wine maker, before the event and their comments about Latour give a perspective on the property.

And one key element is the relatively greater consistency in the wines of Latour over the last 20 years compared with wines made between the 1930s and 1960s.

“If we have a byword it is consistency, “ said Hare, acknowledging that that word was not always used to describe Latour during that earlier four-decade period.

A British firm acquired Latour in 1963 after it had fallen into disrepair, and Hare said when the company, Pearson Group, took it over, “50% of the vines were dead,” and the wine making facility hadn’t been renovated in ages.

There is a marvelous (perhaps apocryphal) tale that Harry Waugh, former director of Latour, likes to tell about the sale of Latour by the de Beaumont family, owners for nearly 300 years.

Waugh says that British banker-financier Lord Cowdray was told by his staff that Latour was for sale and could be a good purchase. After investigating and seeing the investment potential, Cowdray, apparently a lover of spirits, is reported to have said, “I’ll buy the place as long as I don’t have to drink the bloody stuff.”

That sale benefited Latour, France and all wine lovers because the new owners began to modernize the place, and Hare pointed out, “We have made a big investment over the last 20 years.” Le Sommer added that much of the improvement in Latour has come in the vineyard.

One reason for the depth of this wine, in addition to the familiar arguments that quality and style are due mostly to soil and climate, is that the chateau uses two methods to limit the size of production (to no more than 25,000 cases a year, often less).

One technique is simply not harvesting all the grapes that French law permits. Hare said, moreover, that Latour has reduced even the crop it was harvesting between 1970 and 1980, when the house produced some awfully good wine.

The second technique came about as a result of the massive replanting job that faced Pearson in the 1960s. In an effort to maximize the land that has always been Latour, the managers located two parcels that are not in the center of the property, but which grow grapes that have essentially the same characteristics as the primary land.

The two remote parcels produce some excellent lots of wine, said Le Sommer, but the quality is simply a tad low for inclusion most years into Latour. So in 1966 a “second wine” was made for the first time.

Les Forts de Latour, with a label quite similar to Latour itself, is made from grapes off the remote plots as well as from vats of Latour wine deemed not to be of Grand Vin status, which generally is from vines that are less than 10 years old. And, said Hare, Les Forts de Latour is not sold the same way most other chateaux second wines are sold.

“We tend to keep it in the bottle long enough, to make sure it is not drunk too young,” he said. The 1966 wine wasn’t released until 1970, about a year or two after most of the other second wines of the top chateaux, and the 1983 is the current release, with the ’84 to be released soon.

Hare admitted, “We haven’t been doing a good enough job” of promoting Les Forts de Latour, though it usually represents excellent quality at a most reasonable price. I have a few bottles left of the 1970 Les Forts de Latour that is absolutely wonderful wine, and Desai noted recently that the 1966 Les Forts is one of the best wines of the vintage, rivaling Latour itself.

Desai’s three-meal tasting event was not the first time a so-called “vertical tasting” of Latour has been staged. English author Edmund Penning-Rowsell wrote in his book “Bordeaux” of many he has attended. But Hare praised the Desai event as “one of the most profound tastings of this sort we’ve ever done, because the best way to find out about a wine is to have it with food.”

Desai, a physicist at the University of California at Riverside, said the best wines of the tasting were, expectedly, from the greatest vintages, and he said the 1961 was “incredibly impressive, and the ’64 was remarkable. But the thing that impressed us was the wines of the 1980s--one vintage after the other they made excellent wines.”

(As a side note here, Desai said he and other attendees liked the ‘82, though when I ran through the first two decades of Latour at the first evening, I was very disappointed with the initial aroma of the wine. I found the ’78 and ’81 to be superb.)

The single best wine? Desai said it was a toss-up, with some tasters preferring the 1928, some the ’45 and some the 1970, “and the 1900, tasted from a magnum, was superb.”

Desai said he had read so often of Latour’s ability to make top wine even in off vintages that he arranged one flight of wines all of which were from off vintages, including bottles from 1940 and 1944, when the vines were poorly tended because of the war. “All the off-year wines were excellent in the sense that from some other producers, wines from these vintages would have been undrinkable,” he said.

Alan Hare will next be in the United States in a few weeks conducting a tour of Bordeaux producers as they unveil the 1987 wines. I noted to Hare that 1987 was considered a rather poor vintage in Bordeaux.

“Yes, that’s why I asked to conduct this tour. We’re quite proud of our ’87.” It is, after all, a Latour.

Wine of the Week: 1988 Kendall-Jackson Sauvignon Blanc ($8.50)--Some purists may wince when they sip this wine and find there is a trace of residual sugar. But after they say that, watch them drink up two or three more glasses to prove it to themselves. This is about as yummy a wine as Sauvignon Blanc can produce, with pear, melon and apple scents and a trace of lime. Hang the dollop of sugar; it’s delicious wine.