In praise of Sunday lunchtime claret: Lalande Borie 2006

by Gareth Groves

I like Bordeaux. It’s a brilliant city to visit, the food is great (as long as you like duck in all its guises) and the wine isn’t too bad either. Of course, there is more than one Bordeaux when it comes to wine. At one extreme, there is the Bordeaux of fine Medoc chateaux, stratospheric pricing and investment potential. At the other end of a long, sliding scale there are hundreds of small producers who struggle to find a market for their inexpensive wine.

Lalande Borie 2006 comes from closer to the top end of that scale than the bottom. The chateau carries the St Julien appellation, is owned by Bruno Borie of Ducru-Beaucaillou, and is sold en primeur. It is a far cry from generic, supermarket reds simply bottled as ‘Bordeaux’. Yet despite coming from the same stable as one of the region’s biggest names, the 2006 is not a starry wine. It is balanced, refreshing, elegant and bright: very good but hardly distinguished or exciting. It is a wine that satisfies rather than sets the pulse racing.

It reminded me of the passage from the Bordeaux section of Andrew Jefford’s excellent tome The New France, when Jefford describes a (much more humble) claret as the sort of wine that “would slip down with the gratifying ease of a billiard ball rolling serenly towards its pocket…it would never win any more than a bronze medal anywhere, and it was lucky to win bronze; it wasn’t that sort of wine. But it was a satisfying, balanced, supremely digestible drink. Bull’s-eye claret.”

Paired with some hard cheeses after Sunday’s lunchtime roast, it was the perfect wine in a deliciously uncomplicated way; giving pleasure to the drinkers but never threatening to interrupt the conversation. What more could one ask for?

More for one’s money, perhaps? A wine that does prompt discussion?

A quick google reveals you can pick up Lalande Borie 2006 for anything between £15 and £25, not an insignificant sum for a wine that fails to set the pulse racing. It made me wonder if there is still value for money to be found in Bordeaux.

What do you want from a £20 bottle? Does a wine need to have bells, whistles and fireworks to sell at this price – or are you happy with supremely digestible?

Tags: Bordeaux, Bordeaux wine, Lalande Borie, Lalande Borie 2006, Sunday lunch wine

This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2010 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Bibendum Blog, Food & Wine, Wine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.