Premier Cru Supérieur, Sauternes 2006

Why this bottle matters

Yquem is the only Premier Cru Supérieur of the 1855 classification, and it is not made every year. 2006 was a difficult season — a warm, dry summer followed by a cold, wet August that brought unwanted rot — and the wine exists because the estate picked each plot at exactly its moment, passing through the vineyard again and again. Robert Parker found a wine built on finesse and elegance rather than sheer weight, in the manner of the 1988, with fifty years and more ahead of it.

Behind the poetry sits an analysed wine: 13.8 % alcohol against 122 grams of residual sugar, raised for twenty months in barrel — the equilibrium Parker read as finesse. It is not one of the handful of vintages his team crowned with a hundred points, which is partly the point: a great house's difficult years are where its method shows most clearly, the estate's own account of 2006 describing weather some called insurmountable, answered by picking each parcel at its exact moment. Difficult or not, Yquem ages on the same generational curve — and the record of where a bottle has waited is what decides whether it gets there.

Cellaring perspective

Yquem outlives almost anything else in wine. Its balance of botrytis, sugar and acidity lets well-kept bottles evolve for generations, which is why condition and unbroken custody matter here more than for nearly any other bottle.