Château Haut-Brion 1855 1er Cru Graves 1921

Hard to believe that this wine is 104 years old. The colour is still intact, more than a hint of ruby red, so delicate with barely there tannins, tobacco leaf, cranberry, earth, saffron, white truffle, miso broth, cold ash. In its twilight but still has such charm and finesse, a memory of a firmer architecture, and has a moment of revival after 15 minutes in the glass, where the fruit gathers strength (so much so that I happily had two glasses over an hour – astounding when you think of the age of the wine). Haut-Brion was bottled as Graves wine at the time, a full four decades before it became a Cru Classé de Graves, and six decades before it became a Pessac Léognan – but already securely established as an 1855 1st Growth, one of only four at the time. The owners of Haut-Brion in 1921 were the Milleret family, but they were in financial trouble and would be foreclosed by the bank Compagnie Algerienne in 1922. It must have been tough, you would imagine, to take advantage of a vintage that was so hot at harvest that many estates had high alcohols and therefore trouble controlling the fermentation, but they can be proud of having produced this wine that is still delighting more than a century after bottling. As ever with wines this age, the Drink By date is meaningless. It feels like it only has a few more years left in it – but possibly that is the impression it has been giving for the past 40 years. Worth saying though that this was drunk at Bern’s Steak House in Tampa, where the cellar is exceptionally cool and well maintained. I imagine the only better place to have drunk it would be from the cellars of the château itself.