1991 M. Chapoutier Hermitage La Sizeranne

Community Tasting Notes (51) Avg Score: 91.0 points

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  1/23/2024 - SpenceP wrote: 96 Points

  What an amazing wine! As I get to know it better, I love it more and more. It's not an easy wine, which, for me, is part of its appeal--to really understand how magical it is, you need to give it a lot of attention over a long stretch of time. It's not all that complex at any one moment. Rather, its complexity comes as a parade of autumn forest, coffee, cedar, black plums, fruit cake, tobacco, maraschino cherries, smoke, leather, melon, peaches, raw almonds, milk chocolate, roses, and on and on, each coming into the spotlight for a moment and then stepping aside to let the next take its turn. Elegant and refined, with an exceptionally long aftertaste. [Tasted over an hour and a half from the Jancis Robinson glass. I gave this bottle more than two weeks upright for the sediment to settle out, and I strongly suspect that this wine needs that. See my earlier notes of 10/13/23, 2/7/23, 10/16/21, 2/8/20, and 10/17/19]

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  11/4/2023 - Fretzcowine wrote:

  Bret said to decanter for two hours

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  10/13/2023 - SpenceP wrote: 95 Points

  Although, unlike the two most recent bottles of this wine that I've tasted, this was a "normal" wine, it was no less beautiful. Immediately after opening, the wine was unpleasantly acid. But after just ten or fifteen minutes in the glass it became gorgeous, with cedar, baked plums, and tobacco, followed by a wonderfully vivid and long tobacco-infused aftertaste. At around the 40 minute point, rose petals entered the mix. And at around 80 minutes, cherries became a major element. At every stage, the wine was intensely and vividly present. If you're about to taste this, it might be worth glancing at my earlier notes from 2/7/2023 and 10/16/2021, since I have no way of knowing which incarnation of this wine you're going to get! [Tasted over two hours from the Jancis Robinson glass.]
  (I've been thinking about my reaction to this latest bottle of this wine, and I've come to suspect that the reason this bottle, while still superb, was not the amazing experience of the two previous bottles is that I gave those two bottles a full two weeks for the sediment to settle out. I gave this latest bottle "only" six days. While it's hard to imagine that six days wouldn't be plenty of time, my guess is that there was a lot of very fine slightly bitter sediment still present in the wine this time, causing the difference. The next time I taste this wine I'm going to give it a full two weeks!)

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  2/27/2023 - peanutbutterskittles Likes this wine: 92 Points

  Savory game notes, peppery, and good acidity still with some lingering, but diminished fruit.

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  2/7/2023 - SpenceP wrote: 96 Points

  What an extraordinary wine! This isn't an "easy" wine to understand--I thoroughly misunderstood the first two bottles I tasted and only really got what the wine was about on the third bottle. This was the fourth and totally confirmed the experience of the third (October 16, 2021).
  
  The tricky thing about this wine is that, unlike other great wines, the "complexity" of the wine doesn't consist in an extraordinary number of things going on all at once. Rather, and uniquely in my experience, it consists in the wine's astonishing way of changing and changing and changing in the glass, with smoke, cherries, roses, leather, peaches, melon, and more and more, each one getting a brief moment in spotlight and then yielding the stage to the next. It's an amazing experience, and one that requires a lot of attention over a long period.
  
  All of this makes this a very difficult wine to fit into any scoring system. The last time I tasted it, I stuck strictly to the same system I use for other wines and gave it 94 points. This time, I'm using the score to give a more accurate idea of how wonderful a wine this is and am giving it 96 points.
  
  This should continue to be fabulous for at least several years, quite possibly longer in bottles with corks in good condition. [Tasted from the Jancis Robinson glass.]

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