Give a gift they’ll savour all year long. Gift a Membership Now

A surfeit of Haut-Brion

I suffered Haut-Brion poisoning on Monday, chiefly because of the over-generous provision of magnums of same the night before: a magnum of each of 1983, 1978, 1970 and 1964 for a relatively small dinner table. (Yes, I am powerless to resist.)

It was interesting to compare them in pairs blind. The 1983, a wine I know reasonably well in bottle and which I think is coming to the end of its days in that size, was very much drier and more austere in this particular magnum. In fact, since this was the first wine we tried to guess blind...