2005 Château Ausone
Community Tasting Note
Cailles wrote:
Wednesday, September 8, 2021 - 20 Vintages of Ausone (1986 - 2015): All wines tasted single blind. Ausone is a rare bird and hence, the term „once in a lifetime“ certainly applies to this tasting. A few oberservations: 1) Huge quality improvement in recent years: Only after 2005 I can see Ausone up there with the best Bordeauxs thanks to less oak, more depth and precision and a hightened elegance. 2) The high Cabernet Franc share in the blend (ever increasing) makes these wines quite unique, lighter and with more airiness and a darker fruit expression than most right banks. 3) The wines need a lot of time: Ausone is rather a late bloomer and does not provide as much early drinking fun as many of its right bank peers - especially the great vintages (05, 09, 10, 15). 4) The best wines with the highest scores were almost all off-vintages (a first for me). The highest scores went to 08, 06, 07, 14. These wines are weightless and show how great the big vintages will be once mature. Only the 05 was up there with the off-vintages. 5) Wine of the night and my best off-vintage Bordeaux ever was the 2008 (rated 98 pts).
TN: This had a rather muted nose but showed great on the palate with loads and loads of dark and dark red fruit, minerality, herbs, earthy notes and some coffee notes. Quite complex and very precise and still I got the feeling that we‘re just scratching on the surface here and with more air and a few more years of age, this could become a masterpiece. The structure is very fine with satiny tannins and a well-integrated acidity. The texture has a nice creaminess but the wine still will need more time to shed some baby fat and become lighter and airier. 95 pts thanks to the complexity and precision. Like the 2009 and 2015, this has a lot of substance and is quite promising but in this tasting it didn’t really show all it has in store. A bit more air might have helped here as witnessed by a bottle of the 2016 we had recently which needed a few hours of air to open up and showed brilliantly (rated 97 pts).
Decanting: Not decanted. I guess a solid two hours in the decanter would have helped to elevate the experience.
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