A day with Dom Rosé is always going to be a good day. I'm told this was quite reductive when it was opened -- I got to this wine a little later. This is screamingly young, with a real steely quality to it. The acids are a bit bracing right now, and the minerality and all that good stuff just needs more time to knit itself together. It certainly rounded out in the glass, and I suspect that this will be one to enjoy down the road. That said, this was still super delicious for its sheer concentration and power now.

Very dark colour. A lot of people at the table liked this wine a lot more than I did. While it didn't show any oxidation, it had a really weird botrytis and coconut quality to it (almost like a Sauternes). Rounded texture with some good acids, but as far as chardonnay goes, really not my style.

My understanding is that this vintage is a bit of a rare bird (though I do see a few listings for it as I write this tasting note). The nose on this was quite funky at first, as you'd expect from a wine that's been cooped up in a bottle for that long. But then, as that mushroom funk blew off, this started to reveal a really lovely bottle of Rioja, with lots of dark fruit, mushrooms, barnyard, and sweat. Quite wild, really. I revisited this bottle much later in the evening and in fact, the American oak dill started really shining through. It's always a treat to have a bottle of old Rioja in great shape.

This was served semi-blind. I knew it was La Chapelle, but did not know the vintage. There's a lot of secondary characteristics on the nose, with fruit that just isn't quite fresh anymore. I'm missing a lot of the secondary characteristics I like in syrah -- smoke, meat, olives. There's definitely a good bit of ripeness to this wine too. With a bit of air, this started falling apart, and I picked up some coffee tones. I had guessed a ripe vintage from the 80s (1985 or 1989) and when told it was younger, I guessed 1997, though at the end of the day, this bottle seemed a bit advanced to me.

Drank alongside the 2003 Fonsalette, I thought this to be the much more elegant and lighter of the two wines. It didn't quite have the same feral spice quality that the Fonsalette did, but this was much more demure and shy. On the palate, there is an incredible wealth of sweet fruit, and there's never any jammy or roasted quality at all. You could feel the alcohol a little bit (I didn't check the abv), but it worked well with all that sweet fruit.

This is all white pepper. It's amazing, if it weren't for the red fruit on the nose as well, you'd guess you were smelling a pepper shaker. This bottle, next to the 2003 Pignan, seemed a bit more ripe and the fruit showed much more powerfully. It's not as finessed and light as the Pignan either, and the tannins here were definitely much weightier than the Pignan as well. Again, though, there's no sign of jamminess or overripeness here. Except for the little touch of extra alcohol on the back end, there's really nothing that I'd pick out as being from that (t/h)orrid vintage that nobody ever talks about.

This wine has got some really serious oomph to it. Black in colour, heavily black peppered, meaty, and dense, this stood out amongst the other six Rayas wines we had tonight. This is a really potent bottle that didn't have the same light airy elegance that the rest of the wines did. On the other hand, what this lost in that elegance, it gained in raw power. There's a sappy quality to the fruit here, but that's nicely buffered by some sweet tannin. I should note that the acid's not as high here, but this is some serious stuff just the same.

This was my favourite among the non-tête-de-cuvée Rayas wines. I found this the most well-integrated, with plenty of sweet fruit, a hint of white pepper, clear minerality, and ripe acids. At the same time, there's a lovely floral tone to this wine that I didn't quite pick up on the others. But make no mistake, despite this perhaps being the lightest of the wines, the others were no more serious than this one.

This was a very light example of Châteauneuf, but an incredibly perfumed nose with a hint of stems, bright red fruit, and lovely florals. The palate here is silky and elegant, with really fresh acids serving to give a driving force to this wine. The tannins are well-integrated; this is drinking fantastically at the moment. With a bit of air, some darker fruit character starts to emerge, but this wine never sheds that beautiful lightness.

Believe it or not, this was my favourite out of the Rayas wines tonight. The riper vintage character shows quite prominently here, but again with the rest of the 2003s, this never gets jammy or roasted or overripe. Instead, you get this amazing sweet red fruit expression from nose to finish. The touch of heat on the back end again reminds you that this isn't a weakling of a wine -- there is way too much complexity and concentration here for that. This just dances on the palate -- a brilliant wine through and through.

In contrast to so many glowing notes on this wine, I found this closed down for business tonight. While it is beyond doubt that there is a lot of great material here, this wine was not flaunting it as openly as I thought it could. I let this sit in my glass for quite a long time, but it just never really showed what it could have been, although it was quite easy to find a lot of lovely fruit and mineral. Best of all, you could still pick up that effortlessness that seems to be a hallmark of these wines. Now if I would play the guessing game, I'd call this to be the best wine of the 01/03/05 trio in the long term, although tonight, that was not the case.

#23-15, 8% abv. This is some next-level riesling. After the disappointing 2014 Prüm tasting a few months back, I wasn't particularly excited about my lot of these. Turns out I was just being an idiot. This is incredible. Super concentrated white peach on the nose and palate, with really screaming acidity that brings to mind some 2010s. Absolutely delicious, we were all joking about making slushies out of this. I'd seriously consider it.