Yesterday, Neal Martin’s report on Bordeaux 2015 was released. The report, which was written before Martin left The Wine Advocate for Vinous, has been posted on RobertParker.com with a proviso.
According to the publisher: “Readers should note that this is purely a reference article, meaning that Neal Martin’s notes and scores are available to view here in article format, but they will not go into our database and therefore cannot be considered official Robert Parker Wine Advocate reviews.”
As a result, the full list of notes and scores exists on a web page (which you can find here; we advise CTRL+F for easy searching) in list format. Scores from Lisa Perotti-Brown, The Wine Advocate’s Editor-in-Cheif and new Bordeaux reviewer, are the official scores for the publication and can be searched for on the site.
Now that’s clear, what did Neal Martin have to say about Bordeaux 2015?
His views and scores, overall, remain consistent with his En Primeur report on the vintage. That is that it is the best year since 2010, but with less consistency and hence fewer “snow-capped peaks of brilliance”. (The report was written before the arrival of The Beast From The East, so readers are encouraged to interpret this figuratively.)
Martin found just two wines worthy of a perfect 100-point score: Haut Brion and Canon. On Canon, he says that even after tasting the wine several times, “[he] could not find a flaw, and it merely confirmed [his] sentiments from barrel.”
Many readers would have been eager to read Martin’s review of Margaux 2015, which Liv-ex members voted “wine of the vintage”. The critic “spent many hours procrastinating over whether it merited a perfect score”, but concluded that due to the flicker of doubt in his mind, it should receive a score of 99. He added: “If it eventually receives a three-digit score, I would not be surprised.”
Martin’s top ten scores for the vintage are shown in the table below.
Readers of the report will note few significant changes from Martin’s En Primeur scores for the vintage. The table below shows where wines have broken out of their barrel range. To produce this table, we restricted our search to the 100 wines analysed by Liv-ex at En Primeur.
You can find the full report on The Wine Advocate.
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