Solid Champagne, fairly typical commercial style although perfectly pleasant. Seems to have a sweetness and gloss to it with somewhat deep, brassy flavors expressing the red grapes more than the white.

This is one of the most impressive Trimbachs I've had. Doesn't seem sweet at all, but not aggressively dry and austere, either, just rounded and friendly with a bright, sunny demeanor, the fruit just tropical enough to be tasty and just starting to show a hint of the deeper tones that connote an aged character, but mostly still fresh and luscious. I really like the texture and physical palate presence, too. It has an expansive, kind of billious sensation, both suave and mouthfilling.

Big wine. This bottle is showing much younger than I might have expected. It takes some time before it starts to integrate the oak-barrel elements, which are imparting those mocha/root-beer scents and flavors. There's some seriously thick fruit and structure, too, so the oak isn't totally overpowering. "Muscular" was one of my first thoughts on every sip, but it actually has a fairly suave, rounded mouthfeel despite all those veins of tannin pulsing through it.

Very pretty. It's the lightest-bodied wine of our lineup today, almost airy, but still impressively fleshy and sweet-fruited considering both the character and the age of the vintage. I was actually surprised by how youthfully red-fruited it is, not much tertiary or even secondary stuff going on here. There is an ever-so-slight ashiness to the aroma as well as a slight edginess to the tannin in the fashion of many '01s, but most of the tannin is saturated by the fruit material.

A definite step up from the '01 in the Bouchard wrapper, which is apparently a vintage thing as both wines were made by Liger-Belair, or so we understand. This is richer than the '01 yet seems even more elegant and rounded. There's a sweet kirsch-like fruit flavor at its core and a layer or two of something deeper and darker. And while this, like the '01, is still mostly about the fruit without exhibiting any of the more exotic flavors one might expect to find, it does still seem to exhibit certain aspects of the vineyard's personality, or at least what I'm coming to view as the vineyard's personality - that Richebourg-like opulence but with a more open-knit, less tensile presence.

Corked.

Well, this was not a day when any of the contenders to the grand cru throne were able to touch the real thing. You think of Richebourg, you think of power, but this actually might have been the most mild wine of the lineup. But it was just pure class, exceptionally refined and actually very open-knit, especially by the standards of the cru. It also had the most expressive and complex aromatic profile of the group; it's impossible to throw any combination of ingredients in a bowl and approximate what this smelled like but it had a savory, gamey thing going on along with something that seemed almost grainy or wheat-like.