The best Bordeaux of 2006

Fresh from the most important wine tasting event of the year, resident wine expert Matthew Jukes picks the best that Bordeaux has to offer.

It is a bizarre feeling when you board EasyJet at that hellhole Luton airport and find the entire UK wine trade lined up, awaiting the annual Bordeaux en primeur tasting frenzy the single most important week of wine tasting on the journalist's calendar. I launched into four days of gripping tasting, determined, as every year, to nail the character of this vintage, to find the stars and identify the chateaux who should have done far better!

After filling in more than 100 A4 equivalent pages with notes it is my opinion that this is a very good vintage. Once we would have to wait four or five years for one of these to come along, but technical know-how, global warming and sheer terror of failure is working in our favour. A lot of money is spent buying Bordeaux futures, while wine lovers and wine brokers await the release of the prices of these wines chateau by chateau over the next few weeks. This is after all the single most important wine region in the world.

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Matthew Jukes

Matthew Jukes has worked in the UK wine business for well over three decades and during this time has written 14 wine books.  

Matthew regularly lectures, judges, speaks at wine conferences and runs masterclass tastings for both corporate and private clients all over the world. Matthew is also the creator of his ground-breaking initiative, the One Day Wine School, an indulgent day of tasting and learning first performed in 2006.

He has been the MoneyWeek wine correspondent since 2006 and has written a weekly column for the Daily Mail’s Weekend Magazine since 1999. His four highly-acclaimed, annual wine reports – the Burgundy En Primeur Report, the Bordeaux En Primeur Report, the Piemonte Report and the 100 Best Australian Wines – are published on his website, www.matthewjukes.com.

Matthew is one of the world’s leading experts on Australian wine and, with Brisbane-based wine writer Tyson Stelzer, runs an annual competition in Australia to find ‘The Great Australian Red’.  He was made Honorary Australian of the Year in the UK at the 2012 Australia Day Foundation Gala dinner. 

Matthew is a winner of the International Wine and Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year Trophy.  His thoughts, recommendations and tastings notes are followed very closely by the wine world at large.