World’s Most Distinguished Master of Wine Revisits Barboursville

Michael Broadbent MW Tastes Wines at Lunch with Luca Paschina

The English wine critic, Michael Broadbent MW, revisited Barboursville Vineyards for lunch with winemaker Luca Paschina in June, for the first time since spending an evening at the winery 6 years and 79 columns ago. A wine expert so internationally respected that the term, “authority” rings hollow and dull, Broadbent trained as an architect but went immediately into wine sales, in which he briskly staked out a career as an enormously trusted arbiter of age-worthy wines, with resolutely unwavering standards and a palate memory steeped in the most privileged tasting notes in the industry, now spanning more than 50 years.

This critic with an architect’s eye for structure, elegance and longevity in wine is the founder of Christie’s Auction Wine department (1966), consultant to collectors, 3-time winner of the Glenfiddich Award for writings on wine, Decanter Man of the Year in 1993, and writer of Decanter’s “Tasting Note” column, month after month for more than 32 years. Broadbent’s first visit to Barboursville reported on his discovery of Virginia Cabernet Franc as “seriously good,” favourably competitive with St Emilion, and resulted in this historic bit of advice to winemaker Luca Paschina: nobody will take this excellent wine, Octagon, seriously, until you produce it as a vintage wine. Six years later, Octagon vintages have won the Monticello Cup twice (2006 and 2009), the World Wine Championship at Beverage Testing Institute (2009), more than 25 Gold Medals and numerous other awards of merit. And, above all, the gracious comments of Michael Broadbent’s Tasting Note 387 for Decanter, dated this August, furnish an encouraging update on what became of his advice: “State’s Evidence: Virginia, 1, California 0.”

Just as importantly for Barboursville, and for all of Virginia winemaking, is Mr. Broadbent’s nuanced and emphatic Five Star rating of two vintages of Luca Paschina’s Malvaxia Passito, the only example of a Passito-style dessert wine known to us in the Eastern United States, and his praise for Luca’s age-worthy Viogniers, possessing “the quality and flavour to match -- even exceed -- Rhône’s finest Condrieu.”