Community Tasting Note
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astro Likes this wine: 95 points
July 21, 2016 - A great wine still drinking well. My experience was NOT popping the cork and enjoying the old wine–much more drama than that. While normally a rare wine like this would be served only in house, we decided to have corkage at a fine restaurant. To decide if the wine was even drinkable, I did a pre-corkage at home:
1. Opened the wine and carefully removed the still intact but crumbly cork. Decanted the wine and tasted. While there were not fatal flaws, the overall wine was not very good; Light fruit aroma, very unpleasant taste strong acidic. The important aspect at this early stage is that the wine was strong (in aroma and taste) with no fatal flaws of old wines such as port characteristics or other undesirable smells and tastes.
2. Wine was obviously not flawed, but had objectionable acid aftertaste and not much development. Poured wine back from decanter to cleaned out bottle. Use new cork to seal it and took it to restaurant.
3. Restaurant trip was delayed and we had to arrive 1 hour late. The wine, now open for 5 hours, was decanted. It obviously was gaining excellent qualities; nose was intensely flowery with cherry and lavender characteristics. The wine was classic old Bordeaux with strong delightful chutney dried fig leather flavors. Long aftertaste. Very good experience. The wine never felt faded or subject to age flaws. It absolutely needed a long opening to develop into a memorable aged Bordeaux experience.
4.I kept this wine in my wine cellar basement for 20years plus. Writing in the summer of 2016, I suggest that this wine is still good and very drinkable if time is given to it to come to life from its opening to a delayed service that will allow this classic wine to still provide much pleasure so many years from its harvest year.2,993 views