Tasted Friday, September 19, 2008 - Saturday, September 20, 2008 by Keith Levenberg with 1,005 views
(9/20/2008)
Non-vintage. The sommelier estimates the bottle is circa-1960s; by the typefaces on the label I'd assume '50s or older. But the wine in the glass is astonishingly fresh, with piercingly bright white fruit and an enticing scent of gravel and funk. Great depth and purity here, and it really does taste like an un-spritzy Champagne but it's almost fresher than all but the youngest Champagnes.
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(9/20/2008)
Rough in texture, big and broad; dark, almost orange fruit profile packed with flowers and finishing with chalk.
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(9/20/2008)
The Main Event! My first taste of the great La Romanée-Conti. The embodiment of Vosne-Romanée in flavor, as I expected, and a veritable powerhouse, not what I expected at all. Muscular, tense, and bassy -- more like Richebourg than Romanée-St.-Vivant in construction, material, and broad-shouldered proportions. A mouthful of Vosne spices, gaminess, and leather, with flavor authority that colonizes the palate. Turns more granular on the finish and drips with crushed white stone. As it sits in the glass, it relaxes into a flatter plane with less overt torque, the fruit turns more savory and meaty, and the abrasiveness of the tannin perceived in synaesthetic harmony with the spicy seasoning turns the wine into a rush of sandy-textured granularity that feels only barely liquid. No semblance at all of the finishing bitterness that appears in Michael Broadbent's notes on this wine.
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(9/20/2008)
Sweet scents of oatmeal cookies. Slender and silky, but maybe a little too lean; it goes through a phase where it's just flat and boring. But the cinnamon, gingerbread, and brown sugar eventually assert themselves and even though the wine stays a little too thin the sweetness and mealiness of the flavor keeps it interesting.
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(9/20/2008)
Aroma of crushed stones, with a corresponding minerality and granularity on the palate, but with a sweetness to it that turns plump and almost syrupy in its intensity as soon as the fruit asserts itself. And there's a wonderful vibrancy and freshness to the fruit - this is just pristine.
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(9/20/2008)
Doesn't smell like anything special, then taste it and WHAM! a rich and supremely elegant veritable ooze of fruit, deep and bassy and laced with tobacco. With time, develops a perfume of spices and sandalwood.
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(9/20/2008)
A scent of stones. Instantly enveloping on the entry with its rich, creamy cherry fruit, at least as rich as the Musigny but not as plump. A deep bass of underlying flavor and almost totally unstructured, making it feel easygoing and inviting.
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(9/20/2008)
Smells like Mott's apple juice. Eventually gets a little more perfumed. But still tastes flat, sweet, and boring, like Mott's apple juice.
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(9/20/2008)
Just shocking fruit intensity, I can't believe this is 80 years old. This is almost sweet it's so rich and concentrated, laced with tobacco and even a bit of tannin. Completely outside my frame of reference for Rioja but great just the same.
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(9/20/2008)
Much more familiar Rioja character than the Rizcal. Smells like a cobwebbed old attic with a more intense tobacco character to the mild fruit.
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1994 Jean Boillot & Fils Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru Les Perrières 87 Points
France, Burgundy, Côte de Beaune, Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru
(9/19/2008)
Starts out with a deep beeswaxy scent and sharp, crunchy fruit - after a while, it becomes paler, brighter, and purer, the aroma seguing to a nice combo of dulce de leche and pebbly streamwater.
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1994 Vincent Dauvissat (René & Vincent) Chablis Grand Cru Les Clos 75 Points
France, Burgundy, Chablis, Chablis Grand Cru
(9/19/2008)
Nutty scent, deep and adavanced, not much freshness or Chablis character here.
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1947 Quancard Père et Fils Fleurie 95 Points
France, Burgundy, Beaujolais, Fleurie
(9/19/2008)
Way more than just a curiosity. Starts out with a mild aroma of old Burgundy-type horsiness and a prominent structure really showing its bones, with racy Beaujolais acidity framing the gummy red fruit. But with time in the glass -- and this refuses to fade even several hours after decanting -- it segues from a rustic country wine in style to something much more sophisticated, smooth, and silky, with a scent of cinnamon and a graham cracker flavor sweetening a blacker fruit complexion than before, a rusty mineral array, and notes of creaky old unfinished antique wood.
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1953 Bouchard Aîné & Fils Romanée St. Vivant 71 Points
France, Burgundy, Côte de Nuits, Romanée St. Vivant Grand Cru
(9/19/2008)
Nothing left here. Just generic, old red wine.
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1962 Thomas Frères Romanée St. Vivant 99 Points
France, Burgundy, Côte de Nuits, Romanée St. Vivant Grand Cru
(9/19/2008)
Everything you can want in a Romanée-St.-Vivant or grand cru Burgundy in general. A powerful spice box scent plants this squarely in the Vosne-Romanée zip code, and its silky tannin, caressing palate presence, and featherweight touch married to an expansive breadth is practically Musignyesque in its finesse -- in other words, RSV at its finest.
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1961 Charles Noellat Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru Les Beaux Monts 73 Points
France, Burgundy, Côte de Nuits, Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru
(9/19/2008)
Still identifiably Burgundy, sorta, but hollowed out and not much left.
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1953 Charles Vienot Richebourg 97 Points
France, Burgundy, Côte de Nuits, Richebourg Grand Cru
(9/19/2008)
So silky and open-knit, and such a picture of finesse it feels more RSV-like than Richebourg in texture, but it shows its opulence in the exoticism and pure multiplicity of the aromas -- not spice but the patina left behind by spice, like an old piece of wooden cabinetry that had held fading peppercorns and old spices for decades. And to taste it is like licking the inside of that box in a form that's still intensely vinous with a pretty sweetness of fruit.
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1949 Bouchard Aîné & Fils Nuits St. Georges 1er Cru Les Saint Georges 99 Points
France, Burgundy, Côte de Nuits, Nuits St. Georges 1er Cru
(9/19/2008)
Well, this is a pretty conclusive demonstration of the grand cru stature of Les Saint Georges. The breadth and silkiness here are every bit as classy as the Romanée-St.-Vivant but the aromatics are deeper and fuller, starting out like a plume of cigar tobacco, then billowing into a mélange of spiciness and more animalesque scents corresponding to the palate's brothy savor.
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1959 Château Latour Grand Vin 90 Points
France, Bordeaux, Médoc, Pauillac
(9/19/2008)
Tragic, because this bottle (of unquestionable authenticity) tasted so young it was almost pointless to open it. It tastes less than ten years old, darkly fruited with veritable sandbags of tannin. It shows its class in the sophistication of the tannin which is almost Burgundian in its caress but there is so damn much of it that it almost feels wooly and still puckers the mouth. This raises serious questions about whether there's ever a point to buying a wine like this for one's personal consumption; it seems likely there are no original purchasers who will live to taste this in maturity.
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1947 Château Canon 89 Points
France, Bordeaux, Libournais, St. Émilion Grand Cru
(9/19/2008)
Next to the two Left Bank wines, this definitely shows the different material of the Right with its more supple texture even at this age -- but if there were any expectations this would show the storied exoticism and exuberance of the wild '47 vintage, they were quickly dashed as this feels restrained and classically constructed. Smoky on the palate and more mineral on the back end with a trail of red rocks.
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1918 Château Gruaud Larose 87 Points
France, Bordeaux, Médoc, St. Julien
(9/19/2008)
This is 90 years old? Tastes maybe 20. Still has tannin, maybe more exotic aromatically. Good stuff to be sure but a disappointment in the context of the expectation of what 85 years in the cellar can do to a wine.
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