4/2/2016 - Welin Likes this wine:

Nose: cherry and soil
Palette. Leather, tobacco. Some tannins and clear oak character. Lovely wine, will buy some more to store for some years

5/29/2017 - BillLowney Likes this wine:

Unmistakably St Estephe. Dark fruit and volcanic scorched earth. To put your nose into the glass is to overwhelm it. Very aromatic. Good in all departments. Same on Day 2. This seems fully expanded/at peak/mature to me.

4/30/2016 - Gargantua Likes this wine:

Sweet, biting rust nose with some stony bell pepper; candied violet and pineapple gummi bear; palate follows the nose, but some tense tannins need to unwind here. Still lovely, but wait. Strangely, as the night progressed, the 07 Chavaroche opened and the 08 Journaries tensed up and became more bitey. The 07 definitely feels riper.

2/9/2017 - Jimywags wrote:

Decanted for two hours and then slow-oxed for an hour or so. Man, I love Levet's wines. So french, so meaty, so wild. This is no Guigal La La, and it's a much better wine for it. No fruit lathered in 100% new oak and modern polish. Essentially a wine saying like/drink me as I am or you can go f#%k yourself. Game meat, olive brine, earth, soy, and iron with a gravelly, mineral finish. Loved this wine. 95pts.

8/14/2017 - guido23 Likes this wine:

Decanted and consumed over 24 hours. Nice but a little disappointing. Pleasant but altogether unremarkable. Expected much more from a 2000 Pauillac from an estate that I have often loved. Will try again in a few years, although I'm not sure that will help. If anything, it seemed a little tired already rather than too young.

9/3/2017 - Burgundy Al wrote:

Pre-Labor Day Cabernet Dinner (Casa de la Mata - Chicago IL): Tasted double blind. Moderately mature black fruit with cigarbox and licorice, clearly Bordeaux, but seeming older than 2000. This kept cycling from something fun and interesting to slightly less interesting and back-and-forth over the hour+ in glass. Always seemed somewhat tart for the 2000 vintage. Somewhat disappointing vs what I'd expect, or compared to the last time tasted 5 years ago.

8/26/2017 - La Cave d'Argent Likes this wine:

At 33 years of age, there are no good wines, only good bottles. This was a good bottle, perfectly cellared from the time of release by a close friend. Opaque garnet with a brick rim, it delivers a complex mix of black fruit, pickling spice, tobacco, coriander and earth. Full-bodied and with good acidity, it has undetectable alcohol and fully melted tannins. Solid on the mid-palate and long on the back end, this particular bottle would have silenced the naysayers who have judged this wine based upon lesser bottles. Delicious and complex, it is still amazingly good! Those holding well-cellared bottles will be pleased, but it is a wine that is definitely in its twilight years. Drink now.

9/26/2017 - Drsage Likes this wine:

I opened this bottle with great anticipation because back in the 70's as a person just discovering wine I splurged on an early 60's bottle and remember it as amazing. So, I chose the 2005 to celebrate my birthday hoping that it would seem just as great now that I had decades of wine experience. I planned to decant it for 4 hours but had a quick taste mainly to confirm it was not defective. Not impressed at this point, but not worried. 4 hours later the moment of truth had arrived. A nice ribeye was on my plate and the Comtesse was in my glass.....with the resulting impression that it was good, but not great. So I felt mildly disappointed, but it was still certainly a decent complement for the steak. I use vacuum corks so after drinking about a little more than a glass I sealed up the bottle. Now comes the interesting part!!! Two days later after about 3 hours of moving about 15 wheel barrow loads of pink quartz rock in my mission to prove that I could still do at 70 everything I could do at 40 I sat down for a little wine and cheese AND...........VOILA!! SUCCESS, the Wine Gods had smiled on me once again and the Comtesse had bloomed into a wonderful, syrupy, smooth, lingering, dense example of what I consider to be a great wine. I could taste the earth and a million other sensations as it penetrated my senses. I am not sophisticated enough to describe it in the flowery terms that the Pro's use, all I know is that it is among the top 3-4 bottles I have ever tasted and I now have 3 more bottles in my modest collection as incentive to take good care of myself to survive for another 3 years so I can open one on each birthday. It always amazes me at the diversity of comments in these forums. I am trying my best to become a "wine snob", and I am blown away by what it takes become a Sommelier, but I just can't bring myself, at least not yet, to become too serious about being able to describe the taste of something as subjective and complex as red wine. But I sure enjoy drinking it and reading the comments of others....especially some of the Pro's who seem to have a sense of taste similar to mine. I will say that for me, the color and bouquet were average but the flavor, body, and finish were nothing short of marvelous.

4/23/2016 - Chomsky wrote:

Another fine Gonon St. Joseph. It's young and its sticky pitch clings to every available surface, though the wine is only medium-bodied and laced with an elegant floral perfume. What volume there is comes from the tannins, which at this stage demand rich fare. There's beef jerky, and then there's beef jerkin, which this wears proudly as well as a pile of stems brandished like a talisman against pallid palates, like garlic to a vampire. Richness and delicacy together, i.e., your classic Gonon. You really can't go wrong here unless you're a hater.