Bordeaux 2005 has sent the wine world on Cloud Nine. The latest in the procession of rave reviews is Jancis Robinson's ecstatic pronouncements in her column in FT Weekend (Financial Times). Here's a sampler. (For the complete article, you'll have to follow the link given at the end.)

Most years I find tasting hundreds of young primeur samples of Bordeaux intellectually fascinating but physically exhausting. This year, even after tasting well over 500 samples of often still-fermenting red and white Bordeaux barely six months old, I felt great. Why? Because most years the palate is assaulted by a succession of wines that have an excess of something: alcohol in 2003, tannin in 2004, acidity in 2001. ... In 2005 nature did everything right so that decent quantities of beautifully healthy grapes were delivered to practically every cellar.

Jacques Thienpont of Le Pin called it "the deckchair vintage", a reference to where he spent most of August instead of hovering anxiously over his precious Merlot vines in Pomerol. ... I found hundreds of wines to recommend and don't feel that Frédéric Engerer [of Chateau Latour] was too close to hyperbole when he said "I think now we should retire; we can't do anything better than this."

But I also encountered far too many wines that were spoilt by winemakers who could not accept that nature had given them perfection and were vainly determined to improve upon it.

Find this article at:

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/89a8bc22-cade-11da-9015-0000779e2340,s01=1.html

For the author's detailed tasting notes see the purple pages of http://www.jancisrobinson.com