When Château Lafite Rothschild’s 1982 vintage was released in 1983, it was sold ex-cellars by UK wine merchants to private clients at about £300 per dozen.
Today, £300 would buy you about 93ml – or a small glass – of 1982 Lafite (from Arden Fine Wines, anyway).
Well-cellared examples of 1982 Lafite (like this one) can still be outstanding but if over-traded and over-travelled – some ’82s have been round the planet more times than the International Space Station – they can be disappointing.
Arden’s bottle of this sought-after wine travelled all the way from Bordeaux to Sussex, where we acquired it from a local cellar via an auctioneer.
The ’82 has an unusually and remarkably rich flavour for Lafite, which is a wine characterised by smoothness and gracefulness rather than puissance (“power”), as the French call it.
The 1982 is revered with 1959 and 2010 as the finest 20th and 21st century vintages of Lafite.
But 1858, 1864, 1865, 1870, 1875, and 1899 were good too…
SEE 34 LAFITE VINTAGES 1955-2010 HERE
