Hello; Still trying to better myself. A colleague of mine asked me what was wrong with French wines - why they didn´t get any better while the wines from all over the place (like Oz, California, South Iffrica, Chile, etc) did [1]. My answer took a bit over an hour and was rudely ended by our 13:00 patients arriving and craving counsel of quite another kind. Still, I just wonder. I have read lists of the vintages from Medoc and similar for the last 25 years or so, and I wonder if there is reason to believe that 'difficult' vintages are better handled today than they were, say, 15 years back or so (e g, 1991). Could an exceptional heat wave, like the summer of 2003, have been handled back in 1985, or would a catastrophe have resulted? (Of course, we don´t really _know_ that there isn´t going to be a catastrophe when the first growths are released ...)
Just thinking aloud, you see.
TIA and Cheers
Nils Gustaf
[1] The reason is that the Swedish Systembolaget has a very conservative policy regarding its selection of wines and will, most likely, continue to hawk a lot of the same old plonk that they hawked the last 10 years; also my colleague is in the clutches of an admittedly rather good Systembolaget shop in his home town who tend to recommend good Oz wines. So there is a double filter - global and local.