The Gold List - The 100 Best Bordeaux Wines Ever Made

    HELSINKI, FINLAND, October 18, 2011 /24-7PressRelease/ -- In choosing the all-time top wines from Bordeaux, the most important criterion by far for us was the quality of the wine. We believe it is also the only one that really matters to the ordinary consumer. Even the best marketing campaign or award-winning history cannot turn a bad wine into a good one.

Unlike many other rankings, we did not want to base our list of the 100 best Bordeaux wines on a single tasting. Instead, we took into account all our tastings of Bordeauxs since the beginning of the millennium. At best, the selected wines have been tasted more than one hundred times; even at worst, at least five. This has given us a comprehensive view of the development and constancy of the wines, and removed errors caused by poorly stored or counterfeit bottles.

Although we have mostly tasted wines from the twentieth century, we also opened hundreds of bottles from the nineteenth.

"The market is rife with bottles of diverse conditions and with assorted histories, as well as a growing number of counterfeits, but we have only included in our list wines of whose origin and condition we are 100% certain. This has been a particularly enlightening and agreeable experience for us. In order to ensure our certainty, we have tasted the 100 wines on the list an average of 18 times. Therefore we can confidently declare that the wines in our top 100 ranking truly deserve their places thanks to their quality and their ability to delight drinkers today," said Mr Juha Lihtonen, the Editor of the Fine Wine Magazine.

Having enjoyed supreme appreciation from oenophiles over several centuries, Bordeaux has produced more fine wines than any other wine region in the world. Its numerous vineyards have become legendary and gilded by history among wine lovers. This is particularly evident in the new Asian market, where the nouveaux riches are prepared to pay astronomical prices for Bordeaux wines. In pursuit of higher profits, Bordeaux traders naturally sell most of their wines to the hot Asian market and, especially, its fastest-growing area: China. In a market that is so undeveloped in terms of its wine consumption habits, fine wines often end up being enjoyed much too young, at a time when they do not offer the best value for the prices that are paid for them - although, of course, this also happens in more traditional wine-drinking countries.

Our main mission here at FINE is to help consumers enjoy wines at the time when they offer the greatest enjoyment and value for money. We want to encourage our readers to open and experience the wines that are at their best right now. That is why the biggest weighting in our scores is given to the wines' current enjoyability, which we feel should be the factor that most determines consumers' buying habits.

We have tasted each wine at least five different times and on average 18 different times, believing that it is important to take account of the fact that each bottle is different. We eliminated all instances of bad or suspected fake bottles and say

"We believe that it is unfair to rank wines based on just one single tasting experience'. said Pekka Nuikki, The Editor-in-Chief of FINE.

The Top 17 wines are:

Chateau Cheval Blanc - 1947 - tasted 62 times - 100 points
Chateau Haut-Brion - 1945 - tasted 23 times - 100 points
Chateau Lafite - 1953 - tasted 32 times - 100 points
Chateau Lafleur - 1947 - tasted 12 times - 100 points
Chateau Latour - 1961 - tasted 106 times - 100 points
Chateau Margaux - 1900 - tasted 22 times - 100 points
Chateau Mouton-Rothschild - 1945 - tasted 44 times - 100 points
Chateau Mouton-Rothschild -1959 - tasted 39 times - 100 points
Chateau Petrus - 1947 - tasted 44 times - 100 points
Chateau Petrus - 1961 - tasted 38 times - 100 points
Chateau Petrus - 1989 - tasted 28 times - 100 points
Chateau Le Pin - 1982 - tasted 11 times - 100 points
Chateau d'Yquem - 1811 - tasted 3 times - 100 points
Chateau d'Yquem - 1819 - tasted 3 times - 100 points
Chateau d'Yquem - 1921 - tasted 27 times - 100 points
Chateau d'Yquem - 1937 - tasted 6 times - 100 points
Chateau d'Yquem - 1945 - tasted 12 times - 100 points

The Gold list: find it here: http://fine-magazines.epaper.fi/reader/?issue=22803;ddaa9afc8f646965fc18c9953bb7e82f&lang=en

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