Lights-out stuff. Champagne doesn't get much better than this. *Wine* doesn't get much better than this - this was probably my favorite wine all night in a night packed with magnificent wines. Precise and acute with all of the energy and crispness of young Champagne, but the fruit is developed to the point of pure sumptuousness. The bright lemony flavors have turned to lemon confiture with a rich honeyed character and a touch of fine metal shavings on the back end. Color is still a vibrant yellow. From a magnum.

This was a surprise to me (can't really recall anyone marveling at 1995 vintage Champagne), but maybe it shouldn't have been. This really wasn't all that far behind the stellar '85. Actually smells more butterscotchy and candied than the '85, but it's just as precise to taste. On the front end it has a rich, aged candied sweetness which turns bracing, bright, and lemony on the back end with a finishing wave of chalkiness. From a magnum.

Actually the most explosive aromatically of the Krugs, which is saying something as the '85 and '95 were not shy flowers. But there's a ton happening in the nose of this one, from sweaty funk to sawdust to juicy fried chicken (!), though on the palate it's still (natch) by far the youngest and least developed, with bright lemony fruit and an abrasive fizz. Out of magnum.

Terrific Salon. Perhaps the most Salon-like tasting new release since the 1999. For example, the 2004 recently just tasted like generic young champagne to me. But the sunny vintage here might have brought out some character more precociously than usual. The texture is finessed, as undulating and velvety as a wine can be while still being fizzy. The otherwise youthful lemony flavors are starting to show some sweet jamminess around the edges. Out of magnum.

This wine has been good to me, never disappointed over the last decade and frankly never even really budged. First sip could easily have fooled me as a recent vintage. With a bit of time in the glass it shows more development, getting more golden in tone, a layer of something more exotic like chamomile or something under the fruit. It's still chiseled and crunchy, more solid than liquid like always.

Sorry. I have never been able to get anything out of these Nikolaihof Vinotheks and this one is no exception - I think if you want the payoff from aged riesling you have to age them in bottle, not tank. Tastes like a generic white wine that could have been pressed last year.

Clean, slightly minty nose at first, then starts showing some caramel and raw wood. Fruit is on the exotic, tropical side, but a bit lean and hollow for Coche, not at all the usual heavy footprint.

Gorgeous wine that wasn't getting its due attention with all the fancy labels flying around. Pretty sure this is the oldest Cotat Sancerre I've ever had, and it tastes nearly as fresh as young Cotat Sancerre except the body is cranked up to 11 - dense and oily in texture even though it barely seems to have gotten deeper or darker. It's so clean, feels like it was made with equal parts fruit and aloe cream.

Some raisining here. Either not a good bottle or not a good wine. (Did the fruit get roasted in the cellar or the vineyard?)

Highlight of the Leroy flight. Dense and packed, you can practically feel those famous Leroy low yields. Glossy fruit but as much savory as sweet, nicely developed and another '96 that's in the zone.

Tough to get a read on this one unfortunately. Felt very dry and austere. Meant to come back to it after some airing out but never got there.

Sweet dulce de leche and dark chocolate on the nose, cedary on the entry but then a core of dark berry fruit emerges. Still a whole lotta tannin but refined and brushed like merino wool, and gets finer and finer as it sits in the glass, eventually turning to silk while the fruit picks up a slightly brothy savor. Not much else besides Chambertin can be this refined and robust, simultaneously. Still, it is very primary, the sweet fruit very young and far behind other '02s in development (many of which have shed all the sweet fat and are now closed or closing) - this will need many years to show any kind of maturity, but a mighty fine treat today just the same.

Greatness surely ahead, but significantly ahead, this was way too young to deliver much today. Toasted oakspice nose with a bit of berry. On the palate the tannin is front and center but some fruit seeps in around the edges with an impression of thick skinned black cherries.

Mouton vs. Lafite flight pits the legendary '86 Mouton against the less-legendary '90 Lafite... but the Lafite was the winner on my scorecard. The aromas here were sweet, with some figginess surfacing with air, but still holding things close to the vest. The palate is still very, very tannic, the tannin practically reverberating into more tannin, but it does show some nuttiness and dark fruit with that sur-maturite on the nose manifesting in some pruniness on the back end. I let this sit to see what develops and it did start to show some more classic Pauillac pencil scents, albeit faintly, but didn't budge much.

Starts out with a strongly smoky aroma, in fact smoky to the point of austerity like we were just sat in the smoking section (remember those?). But then some sweet fruit emerges and charges a path through the smoke like a comet. The texture is incomparably finessed and fine-knit in the fashion that distinguishes Lafite from all the other firsts and it's stacked with an array of "how did all this come from grapes?" flavors, most enticingly the funk of black truffle. It was interesting to try this just a few weeks after the '89 because many of those deeper, soil-driven flavors that knocked my socks off in the '89 are here too, just not as boldly as there's a sense in which this still has some more blossoming to do.

Surely a 50+ year wine. Aromas are tight, with a bit of walnut. This is seriously tannic but in an appropriately grand fashion, arching like a cathedral. It's packed with deep, dark blueberry and blackberry fruit, piercingly intense and saturating (and it would have to be to charge through all that structure - which it does). This is still youthfully inky and primary compared to the Lafite and if I preferred the Lafite by a notch it was only for that reason; this is not as far along but it's gonna be an epic journey.

The Latour cranked the fruit intensity up several notches from the Lafite. This cranks the fruit intensity up several notches from the Latour - somehow manages to be even more inky and saturating though in much lighter, redder tones than the deep blue/black Latour, with super-fresh, almost snappy cranberry and raspberry flavors, turning deeper on the back end with something almost charcoal-like. The tannin is much gentler than the Pauillacs. A marvelous terroir tour with everything playing to classic type.