The many forms of lemon

Château Bouscaut Cru Classé de Graves 1989 Pessac-Léognan

Chardonnay – from dry, oaky white Burgundy to exuberant, tropical New Worlders – is a basic touchstone of wine drinking, and the first grape variety many people learn to identify by taste. It takes oak aging very well, and while there is a wave of unoaked Chardonnays now coming out of the New World, Chardonnay remains the natural, default assumption when oak taste is prominent in a white wine.  It can come as a surprise to the palate when an unidentified, oaky white does not otherwise correspond to a Chardonnay profile.

That was my instinctive reaction when I tasted this wine, even though I knew perfectly well there was no Chardonnay in it. It is dry white Bordeaux, which in general is made from Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc or, as on the case of this wine, a blend of the two. It smelled initially of lemons and dusty oak. Now lemon must be the most common tasting note of all in a white wine; probably more white wines than not could be plausibly described as having lemony notes. (I once got in trouble for writing elsewhere that one wine offered in a tasting “smells fresh and lemony; but so does washing-up liquid, and this is not much better, so let’s move on.”) And Chardonnay, while it is more classically fuller, tending towards melon and in some cases tropical fruits, may often have lemony notes to offer.

The Château Bouscaut ’89 did not remind me of Chardonnay at all, despite its oak and lemons. Where Chardonnay would be rich and melon-like, the Bouscaut is dry, not full. It has a very slight smoky note rather integrated with the oak, and a waxy texture that makes me think of candles in churches. Waxiness is a fairly classic Sémillon note, and it can come across in Tokay, too.

This is a good wine. Better vintages of it from the sixties are still being drunk (by the proprietor of Raeburn Fine Wines). No doubt the lemony quality in such old wines will have become quite attenuated, hopefully against the growth of attractive secondary qualities in among the wood, although it might by then be wood and not a great deal else. As for us, it went surprisingly well with our quiche lorraine (and egg can be a bit of a wine killer), although it struggled against the cumin in our sautéed cabbage, and did not perform particularly well against the chestnuttiness of roasted Red Hokkaido squash or the very evocative “Autumn woods” taste it took me a while to place of roasted Harlequin Squash.