The last time I had this it was dull and made me think it might have passed the window of being at its best. But here the fruit still has a bright, youthful freshness to it that makes me think the wine may well have a second wind. It doesn't show the exotic richness that Salon develops with age, but with a profile this fresh maybe there's still time for that to develop?

Big smack of aromatic goodness right out of the gate -- meaty and rusty. It's a very full, broad-shouldered wine but it also has a very lacy, gentle texture. A few people observe that it's turned into more of a generic old Burgundy than anything you could trace to a particular terroir, but even if that's true it's still a very nice one, still in healthy condition, and with an earthy minerality you don't get just anywhere.

Definitely has a stalkiness to it - I will leave it to posterity to judge whether that merely reflects the stems in the vinification or if it's a manifestation of '04 greenies, but it didn't mar the wine for me. Despite it's stalky, tensile spine, it still had a nicely pillowy, comforting presence on the palate - that's RSV elegance for you. Still, I couldn't help but remember that the Hudelot-Noellat RSV from '04 was better than this....

Lots of youthful muscle to this, and it initially seemed bound up in so much tannin that I couldn't get a read on anything else beyond a subtle cured-meat quality. I wouldn't say it managed to open up and betray its secrets, but it did compose itself to the point where even though it's still very tannic, it shows a serious sophistication in its tannic structure, like this geodesical web wrapped around a perfectly spherical body. I've gotten that sense before from La Romanée; not sure I've ever found such symmetry in Richebourg, so this is definitely a very well-put-together wine even if you can't discern much beyond the shape.

On the first sip this seemed very similar to the 2006 but with more length of flavor, an extra little layer of stuff on the back end. As I sat with both glasses, though, that extra little layer seemed to make all the difference as it seemed to crank up the salty meatiness of the wine to a level of expressiveness that sharply contrasted with the reserved personality of the '06 - it became evocative to the point where there was almost something Northern Rhone-like about it. I think several people had this down as their favorite wine of the night and it certainly had a readiness to it that many of the others didn't, even if it's not a top example of DRC Richebourg.

There was disagreement about this bottle with some people complaining of volatile acidity. I didn't notice any whatsoever, though I was willing to concede it was somewhat disappointing relative to expectations. It had some interesting tertiary things going on with a salty meatiness as well as some mealy flavors and a touch of spice, but there was a really thick sheath of tannin constricting the whole thing and making it a bit difficult to make out the details.

Last time I had this it was a Bern's bottle in absolutely perfect shape. This one came from parts unknown and perhaps illustrates the difference between storage that's perfect and storage that's merely passable, since I don't think the four years in between them alone can account for the difference. For one thing, the Bern's bottle was still deeply colored but this one was clearing out with a frail orange tint to it, possibly the result of the absolute crapload of sediment that had precipitated out of it. Fortunately, the wine performed much better than the visual cues alone indicated, with really intense five-spice aromatics that are a totally classic representation of the terroir -- in fact probably the first wine of the lineup to have aged to the point with such pure dirt-driven aromatics minus any influence of stems, barrels, or other primary and secondary things. On the palate this was fairly gentle without the flexing Richebourg muscle my last bottle showed. But fortunately it didn't have any hints of oxidation or other signs of being over-the-hill. I'm not sure how much longer it could have held itself together, but today it was still in decent shape and still showing some character and not generic old wininess.

This is much more reticent and closed in on itself than it was last year. "Verrrrry structured" was the first thing I wrote down in my notes, both from tannin and some edgy acidity that were keeping a tight grip on everything else. It still managed to show some difficult-to-describe non-fruit flavors in the savory-and-spice camp, but for the most part it was sort of wound up in all that muscle. #02938.

Fantastic showing, and clearly a bottle that had been stored in ideal conditions, as is immediately apparent from the still-dense ruby color of the juice. At first, it seemed worryingly hollow -- some tannins wrapped around not much flesh to speak of -- but it quickly became apparent that that was more of a factor of the too-cold serving temperature than any issue with the wine, and once it warmed up to the room it fleshed out nicely and also featured the aromatic smorgasbord that makes La Tache so distinctive, with all sorts of stuff going on in the aroma you couldn't possibly reduce to words, including some gaminess and a spiciness that's isn't the usual Asian five-spice but more in the cracked-pepper family. #02573.

There was a pretty heavy spritz in this bottle which suggested something didn't go right. Refermentation of some kind? But no off-odors, so we just let it sit in a decanter to settle down, which it did, and by the time we got to drinking it it had impressive, powerful aromatics so redolent of lychees that at least three people exclaimed it simultaneously. The flavors were somewhat simple, though, not much to say about it besides sweetish chenin fruit that offers some of the deeper tones of age without tasting anywhere near 80 years old - we left about a third of the bottle undrank, and the wine deserved better than that, but I'm looking forward to trying the leftovers.