The 'Bordeaux Union des Grands Crus' caravan parked in London’s Covent Garden yesterday. Out came the 2005s. This gave me the first chance for a year to taste these venerated and cossetted infants.

Patience was counselled initially, and seems even more vital now. As I tasted, a vision:

Monsieur Hulot or Mr Bean, having decided to splurge on en primeur Bordeaux for the first time eighteen months ago, finally takes delivery of his wine, opens a lip-licking exploratory bottle – and recoils in horror.

The acidity in the wines, always prominent, is going through a lean phase. It is, in any case, bonded with prodigious (though generally well-handled) tannin. The effect, right now, is frightening. Hulot or Bean would also notice bitter end flavours in most of the wines. This is, very definitely, claret for grown-ups. I have a feeling they are going to go through a long winter of closure before finally emerging on the sunlit uplands.

What distinguishes the great wines from the good (and not-so-good) is fruit quality, first of all. The sweetness of youth has largely disappeared, but it should at least be perfumed and aromatic. In less successful wines it’s just plain, plain, plain.

Secondly, the great wines have a hinterland – broader textural depths beyond the merely tannic.

Almost all wines have intensity and concentration – that’s a given in this vintage. What worries me a little is the pleasure principle. Where that intensity is merely a product of prominent acidity bonded to rigid fruit and cascading tannin, then the result is more challenging than truly enjoyable. It’s the pleasure of the bungy jump rather than the boudoir.

Finally: how good has the bottling been? In several wines (Clerc Milon, for example), the bottled sample shown yesterday seemed a clear step or two down from the quality of the barrel sample.

I didn’t taste all the wines shown (hardly possible under the circumstances: the demand was such that the tasting was divided into a morning session and an afternoon session, during which a number of sample stocks were exhausted). I hope to post notes in the Tastings section of this site later (given – ha! – time).

I haven’t bought any 2005 Bordeaux yet myself, but when and if I do so (and the prices are dissuasive) I will be concentrating my buying on Pessac-Léognan (very challenging, but splendid levels of gravel and earth in the best this year, which the terroiriste in me loves) and St Emilion and Pomerol, where the freshness of the vintage has combined with the natural sweetness of Merlot to ravishing effect. (I didn’t taste Pomerol yesterday, but tasted it widely last October.) The Médoc strikes me as patchier, with that extra textural dimension more often missing and with the acidity/tannin attack sometimes overly brutal.

A few stars from my incomplete sweep (scoring 17.5 out of 20 or above), in alphabetical order:

Les Carmes Haut-Brion (beautiful fruit qualities)
Domaine de Chevalier (masterful intensity and depth)
Haut-Bailly (surely the sternest and most aristocratic wine ever from this property)
Pape-Clément (astonishing breadth and mass … a high mass!)
Clos Fourtet (sumptuous, with hedonistic as well as intellectual allure).

A few ‘values’ (troublesome to define in this vintage, of course, but scoring 15.5 to 17 without hurtling into the megabucks zone):
Lafon-Rochet (power and promise, though fiercely inaccessible just now)
Larrivet Haut-Brion (well-handled, with welcome scent and limpid fruits: mid-term rather than long-haul)
Malartic-Lagravière (similar profile but with a plumper, sweeter appeal)
La Tour Figeac (freshness, sweetness and grace).

More on this vintage in due course. Of course …