1982 Chateau Leoville Las Cases

The mistaken idea that L-B is a 2nd could also arise from RP's reworking of the classified growths in one or more of his Bordeaux books. IIRC, he argued for a promotion of L-B to 2nd. And after all, 1855 was so very long ago... ;-)

As '59 was the year of my birth and '61 the year of Jean's, I'll gladly accept Bill's opinion. :P

Mark Lipton

I still have to insist on the fact that Robert Parker was *not* the only critic to perceive the merits of 1982. I remember reading David Peppercorn's vintage report 1983 in Decanter Magazine, stating (I cite from memory) "never in his 35 years of tasting young Bordeaux he had ever seen such an uniformly excellent vintage from cask".

But then — who cared for what the Brits say ...

M.

A response to two separate points from Dale Williams and Mark Lipton.. (Now please don't any of you hair-trigger folks complain about a little text before the quotation. It's not a news- or mail-reader convention as elsewhere, nor done mindlessly; it deliberately introduces a multiple compound quotation.)

Dale Williams:

[By the way, that rotogravure photo is among my wine-clippings files. --MH]

An interesting and engaging point, in my opinion. (The particular collector I cited actually asserted, in a manner discouraging dissent, that Lynch-Bages was an official "second growth" and always had been, implying

1855 classification, as amended by Official Decree of 21 June 1973.) (To the mention of the discussion here a few years ago, it may be evident that people will defend terms to mean whatever they want them to mean, no more and no less -- Churchill -- but especially so on the Usenet. I plan to post a few modest suggestions for understanding the now-very-popular language of characterization and projection, on a local newsgroup ba.food . If you can read that group, you might find it entertaining.)

I haven't closely followed the usage evolution of the phrase "super seconds" but when I noticed it in the press 10(?) years ago, it only denoted wines of official "second growth" status held comparable in quality to official first growths. I understand now from your mention above that the phrase is used sometimes more broadly.

"Mark Lipton" in news:c8ats8$64i$ snipped-for-privacy@mozo.cc.purdue.edu...

(To reintroduce the words of Lord Peter Wimsey, "Well, as the old pagans said of the gospels, It was a long time ago, let's hope it wasn't true." :-)

I would support an international ban on proposed reclassifications of the

1855 Bordeaux list. There are more than enough of them. Every writer on Bordeaux that I have read seems to have done it, and it gets old very fast. (Alexis Lichine went on about it for about half of his 1979 book, ISBN 0394418301, partly or substantially written by Samuel Perkins). Parker indeed would be one of the _latest_ of the many people to do this, but I am sadly confident that he is not the last.

Which is rubbish, of course.

Legally spoken, the 1855 classification was not "amended", but a new "classification of the first growths of 1973" was created.

M.