Chateau D'Yquem at 9 Different Vintages || What I Drank Yesterday

WIne List: 1971 Chateau d'Yquem Sauternes 1986 Chateau d'Yquem Sauternes 1988 Chateau d'Yquem Sauternes 1989 Chateau d'Yquem Sauternes 2003 Chateau d'Yquem Sauternes 2008 Chateau d'yquem Sauternes 2011 Chateau d'yquem Sauternes 2016 Chateau d'yquem Sauternes 2020 Chateau d'yquem Sauternes Find all of these wine and more @WineWatch.com The fame of Sauternes reaches back at least to the time when Thomas Jefferson visited the area in 1785 and ordered a few cases of Château d'Yquem - in Jefferson's day d'Yquem was also the region's non-pareil Château. When the great wines of Bordeaux were classified seventy years later, d'Yquem was so highly regarded that it was accorded the unique status of Grand Premier Cru - a higher classification than the great Médoc clarets like Lafite and Latour etc. It is a little-known fact that the wine Jefferson ordered was quite dry; in fact the first sweet wine from this district was not made until the 1847 harvest at d'Yquem. However, it did not take long for these wines to achieve fame, for in that era sweet wines (Champagne was a sweet beverage then) were very fashionable. D'Yquem's first sweet wine vintage gained tremendous notoriety when the Grand Duke Constantine of Russia paid the then staggering price of 20,000 gold francs for four barrels; ever since it has been one of the most expensive wines of the world. The process by which these great wines come about is fascinating and one of the examples of how nature can play topsy-turvy tricks and make decay a very beneficial rather than a harmful phenomenon. In the fall, under certain conditions, (misty mornings and sunny afternoons) a mold forms on the skin of the exceedingly ripe grapes that are left on the vines. The mold's technical term is botrytis cinerea; the vignerons refer to it as the "noble mold". It often envelopes a grape and feeds on it by sending spike-like tentacles through the skin. It rapidly shrivels the grapes and leaves their skins mere pulp. The remaining juice is extremely sweet, concentrated, and packed with glycerin. The particular conditions for serious onset of the "noble mold" occur only several times in a decade; and often the mold attacks unevenly, so the vines have to be picked over several times. (Picking is done as many as thirteen times at d'Yquem!) Sometimes growers lose patience and pick before the mold takes hold (for fear of a rain-out); the resulting wine is sweet, but it does not have that concentration that results from the shrinkage of the grapes from the mold. The great difficulty and expense of producing these wines in tandem with a great lack of demand after the Second World War discouraged many proprietors; during the post war period, d'Yquem stood almost alone in maintaining the great standards of the past.