Collection: Bordeaux

Bordeaux is the reason a year gift is possible at all. No other fine wine region has made so much, so consistently, for so long. The famous vintages get the attention, but for our purposes the ordinary ones matter more: 1958, 1972, 1984. Bordeaux made wine in all of them, in quantity, and bottles from those years still sit in cellars across Europe. If a year exists, this is usually where we find it.

The wines are Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, often with Cabernet Franc and a little Petit Verdot, grown on gravel and clay along the Gironde and the two rivers that feed it. Pauillac, Saint-Julien, Margaux and Saint-Estèphe on the left bank; Saint-Émilion and Pomerol on the right. Tannin is what keeps them going. A well-stored claret from 1961 or 1982 can still be firm, savoury and entirely itself sixty years on.

There is also Sauternes, which is worth knowing about if your year was a poor one for red. Sweet wine from Sauternes and Barsac shrugs off time in a way almost nothing else does: 1945, 1947, 1967, 1975 and 1976 are all still going, and a bottle of fifty or sixty years old is nothing out of the ordinary. In several difficult harvests the sweet wines were the better half of the vintage, so we will often suggest one when a year leaves us short of good claret.

Every bottle is looked at properly before it leaves: fill level, label, capsule, and where it has been kept. Anything we are not satisfied with does not ship. Anything from before 1990 is sold as a collectible object rather than a promise about how it will taste, and we would rather say so plainly than have you find out on the night.