So how do the 2009s look in bottle?

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I delayed my departure to New York last week by a couple of days so that I could attend the annual presentation by Bordeaux's Union des Grands Crus of the latest vintage to go into bottle. The 2009s had been so unusually ripe and luscious en primeur (see this guide to our extensive initial coverage), and our recent tasting of the 2009 crus bourgeois so impressive, that I was particularly keen to see how the classed growths would perform at this, their first public outing outside France.

The caravanserai that is the UGC en masse had been in Paris...