Yquem 2016 released at €250 ex-négociant (same as 2015), with a UK RRP of £264 per bottle (no change on 2015 release price). Quality score 984 (vs 993 in 2015). Our factsheet below summarises all the key points.
You can download the slide here: Wine Lister Factsheet Yquem 2016
Bordeaux 2017 en primeur scores are now out from Julia Harding MW for JancisRobinson.com – our UK partner critic (Jancis Robinson herself was kept in London updating the World Atlas of Wine for its next, eighth edition).
Harding awarded 14 wines a score of 18 or above, with Pomerol the most featured appellation at the top of her scoreboard. Lafleur, Le Pin, Petrus, and Vieux Château Certan all scored 18.5, the highest score given by Harding to any Bordeaux 2017 (while last year Robinson granted seven 2016 Bordeaux 19 points, including four of Harding’s favourites this year).
This Pomerol quartet is joined by another right bank wine, Saint-Emilion Premier Grand Cru Classé B, Figeac, whose tasting note from Harding ends: “Silky, charming, mouth-watering. So succulent, so precise, unforced.”
The only other wine to score 18.5 is the king of Sauternes, Yquem. As we saw in yesterday’s blog summing up Bettane+Desseauve’s top scores, 2017 is successful vintage for sweet whites. Harding’s top wines include La Tour Blanche and Doisy Daëne’s tiny production Barsac – already released at £140 per half bottle – L’Extravagant.
Like our French partner critics, Harding also gives high scores to Ausone, Latour, La Mission Haut-Brion Rouge, and its white sibling – the only dry white in her top table. Mouton Rothschild and Léoville Las Cases also score 18 points.
All these scores are now live on the wine pages of our website for subscribers to view (alongside those of Bettane+Desseauve), with links through to Harding’s tasting notes on JancisRobinson.com. Read Jancis Robinson’s extensive Bordeaux 2017 coverage here.
Neal Martin’s and Antonio Galloni’s scores will be added on Tuesday and Thursday respectively.
The latest development on wine-lister.com enables you to see the four most interesting nuggets of information about more than 2,000 of the world’s finest wines at a single glance. Simply search for and click on the wine you want to explore, such as Yquem or Ornellaia, and scroll down to Data Driven Analytics.
An algorithm sifts through Wine Lister’s vast database, asking 37 different types of question for each wine in order to identify its most remarkable facts. These are split into four groups: first production data, and then each of the three Wine Lister rating categories – Quality, Brand, and Economics.
The range of questions asked produces different data nuggets for each wine. For example, the Quality analytics for Château d’Yquem references its longevity, whereas for Tenuta dell’Ornellaia the result relates to the average critics’ score.
Explore this feature at wine-lister.com (and look up the most remarkable facts on one of your favourite wines, or see if you can find the top three most sought-after wines, for example).
Yesterday, Monday 19th September, saw the release of Château d’Yquem 2014 – the vintage with the highest Quality score in 10 years.
Drawing on the wealth of information in the Wine Lister database, as well as the views of some of the trade’s key players, we put together a collection of extraordinary facts and figures about this iconic sweet wine:
You can download the slide here: yquem-2014-slide
We have updated our scoring algorithm to remove the impact of very old vintages on wine-level attributes and scores. Our wine-level score is an overall score for a wine computed from both wine attributes such as search frequency for a cru (regardless of vintage), and its individual vintage data, e.g. critic ratings or price performance.
For data that exists by vintage, the equivalent wine-level attribute is calculated by taking an average across vintages, which is then used to compute a score at wine level.
Prior to the update, data from all vintages of a wine would be incorporated into the wine level average and, although vintages were weighted such that more recent vintages had a greater influence (recency weighting), we still found that very old vintages were disproportionately impacting our results.
Château d’Yquem serves as an extreme illustration of this phenomenon:
Prior to the update, Château d’Yquem’s average price (incorporating all vintages) was £712 per bottle, which was heavily skewed by very old vintages with very high prices. These vintages are rarely traded or tasted, and as such should not influence the wine-level average and corresponding wine scores.
As of today, we have updated our recency weighting across all criteria to exclude vintages over 30 years old from the wine-level average. Following the update, our average price for Château d’Yquem is £170 per bottle – a considerable reduction, and a much fairer representation of actual trade price expectations.