With all the hype about the Bordeaux campaign to pre-selling their 2010 wines, it made me think: surely there are more affordable, just as age-worthy alternatives out there. Isole e Olena, Ceparello 2006 , about $60: I had the chance to try this wine at a tasting last year and thought it was terrific. American wine Bordeaux wine pick MORE >>

Hardy Wallace (above) dropped in on the en primeurs tastings and handed out his scores ranging from 101.00 Jancis Robinson provides a primer in the various ways that samples at the en primeurs tastings can be manipulated to show their best. Bordeaux tasting sized poursSIPPED: the zany. to 102.36 points in.17 Eater ]. MORE >>

Over the past month, critics and wine trade buyers have been on the ground in Bordeaux, tasting the 2009 vintage before they go on pre-sale (as “futures&# ) in the coming months. In it, she expresses how difficult it is to taste unfinished wines, calling them “raw, hard, closed, astringent and achingly tannic.&# MORE >>

Apparently the latest issue of Robert Parker’s The Wine Advocate came out yesterday with Parker’s reviews for the 2010 barrel samples and in-bottle tastings of 2008s. But Parker has given the general comment that 2010 ranks as one of “the three greatest Bordeaux vintages I have tasted in my career&# alongside 2009 and 2005. MORE >>

The other week, the Wine Media Guild hosted a Vertical Tasting of three chateaux from Bordeaux–a luncheon at Felidia‘s that began with a one-hour self-pour tasting of twelve wines, before everyone sat for lunch. MORE >>