Decanted for 4.5 hours before taking to the restaurant. It is still a teeth-staining dense and thick red-purple colour. The nose just jumped out of the glass and filled the room........ deep, deep, rich essence of St. Julien with superb fruit concentration and purity....as if a Michelin chef had created the perfect blackcurrant pastille....lots of graphite, really linear in the perfectly machined black slab way. Palate has become more rounded since I last drank it. Very extracted but not in a bad way ( I generally don't like extracted wines), mouth-coating in texture and sensation, still lots of new oak and the tannin on the finish is quite austere with the same 'black slab' sensation as the nose. This has become a younger, more structured and more serious wine in the recent times I have drank it and I think that something extremely good will emerge over the next 5 years or so. A triumph for the vintage.

Decanted for 2 hours then re-bottled for another 4 hours before taking to the restaurant. Perfect cork as though it had been bottled yesterday. Completely opaque and dense purple-red colour that looks 10 years younger than its age. Nose filled the room on pouring..... very perfumed, almost Merlot-like.....complex, deep and mesmerising. Palate has that perfect immediate top-tier Napa attack of gorgeous fresh acidity and purity of fruit but the tannins are still young and not very well integrated on the mid-palate; then BANG! ....a wonderful rolling, ascending, reverberating resonance on the finish that blows you away and resonates for a minute or more and leaves you simultaneously with a belly-filling richness of fruit and spice. Quite acidic and tannic even 8 hours after the initial decant - this is a young wine that is only just entering its proper drinking window even though it seduced me when I last drank it in 2010. Everybody's WOTN.....next time I will open the 1986 and keep the rest of these for 5 more years.

Decanted for 10 hours before pouring with a return to the bottle in between home and restaurant. Seeped but completely intact cork. Gosh....the colour is a vivid and dense purple with highlights of velvet red......I can't help but think that it would appeal to Donatella Versache. Nose is Barolo-esque black liquorice stick spice, black and red liquorice bootlaces candy, tar, sun-warmed asphalt, dried star anise in a curry. really mesmerising but still young and playing 'catch me if you can'. Palate is deep, rich, rounded, very heady and reverberant even before you swallow - star anise, black liquorice root and tons of fresh cardomon that really stands out. Ultra-smooth and unctuous mouthfeel with superb resonance and reverberance and endless length. Ultra-yummy and the most hedonistic of the wines tonight but a bit one-dimensional in comparison. We made a good decision to hold off on this until a course of 3 beautiful Italian cheeses as it repaid the extra time in the decanter. I wanted to like this wine more but I can't see it developing the multi-dimensional complexity for a Grange or a Hill of Grace as it ages over the next decade, although I'm sure it will improve.