The guide to the best wines of the 1988 vintage
Are you looking for a wine from 1988 to mark an important date or celebrate an anniversary? La Bouteille Dorée offers you a little practical guide to find your way around these old vintages and to find a bottle from 1988 that will really please its recipient.
Bordeaux 1988
The 1988 vintage is the first in a series of 3 fine vintages with 1989 and 1990, although often wrongly underestimated compared to the other 2. After a cold and wet first half of the year and a difficult flowering, the summer of 1988 was hot and above all very dry, leading to perfect ripeness of the grapes. The September rains led some estates to harvest the late grape varieties, Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot, earlier, resulting in more acidic and tannic wines.
It is therefore necessary to turn to the best châteaux of the Médoc and the Graves, which offer fruity wines with a lot of finesse, and especially to the wines of the right bank, Saint-Emilion and Pomerol, the Merlot having suffered less overall.
The wines of Sauternes and Barsac are superb, with the humidity in September and October favouring grey rot.
Burgundy 1988
A late flowering due to humidity and cold in May and June and a complicated ripening of the grapes due to the changing conditions during the summer were saved by the beautiful warm and sunny weather in September. The yields were quite low but finally with good maturity and the red wines, more than the whites quite diluted due to the high yields in Chardonnay, are of very good quality, and even more so in the Côte-de-Nuits: ripe fruit, integrated acidity and fine tannins.
The wines have reached their peak but the best vintages will be able to wait another 5 to 10 years in the cellar without fear.
Rhône 1988
Ideal weather conditions were disrupted only by rain and hail in June in the vineyards of the northern Rhône Valley and which only reduced yields. Appellations to look for are Côte-Rôtie, Hermitage and Saint-Joseph in the north with very concentrated and balanced wines and Châteauneuf-du-Pape in the south.
Champagne 1988
A summer contrasted with a cold month of July, Heat in August and rains at the beginning of September finally gave very good champagnes with low yields (rigorous sorting of the grapes during the harvest) but which needed to be waited a few years before being tasted: for the best houses, they still offer a very present fruit and a very good balance.
Other successes of 1988
Among the great successes of the 1988 wines, we can note:
- Alsace wines : 1988 was a very fine vintage with an early flowering, a hot and sunny summer and a perfect maturity of the grapes which gave rise to an early harvest. Great wines, balanced and aromatic, for dry whites as well as for late harvests and selections of noble grains.
- In Germany, the great white wines of the Moselle and the Rieslings of the Rhine Valley and in Italy, the great red wines of Piedmont and Tuscany with wines made for ageing offering a very good concentration, harmonious tannins and a lot of freshness.
- The natural sweet red wines of Roussillon, the old Maury and Rivesaltes.