April 23, 2024 - Whoa this is drinking fantastic at this time. Please give it an hour or so decanting to let the woody aroma dissipate. Then pour yourself a nice sized glass of this beauty. Boysenberry, lavender, camphor and spring flowers explode in the nose. Middle weight in the mouth, toasty French oak, chocolate, tobacco and cherry highlight the finish. Yum!
April 7, 2024 - Drinks well today, should stay stable for a few years
April 7, 2024 - Really nice and open, good sweetness, nice fullnes, nice long aftertaste; lovely
April 6, 2024 - This is in a great place now.
March 17, 2024 - Splash decanted off small amount of sediment. Cassis and blackcurrant, some earthy tobacco. Comes off a bit rustic, medium+ acid and chewy tannins. Drinking well now but no rush.
March 16, 2024 - I didn’t buy much in this vintage as a result of the exorbitantly high prizes due to international demand, but every bottle I tasted was very impressive with dark inky colors and masses of (mostly) ripe fruit, tannines and acids. This wine(my last bottle) is no exception on this: very impressive but for the moment at least 5 years (maybe a lot more) too young (and my god Bacchus knows I like my wines, even Bordeaux, on the young side). A saturated youthful color with still a lot of purple is followed by a slightly rustic bouquet with dark fruits and tobacco with on the palate a mass of tannins which overwhelm a bit the abundant (ripe?) fruit, firm acidity and a long finish.
This wine promises a lot for the future but is, for the moment, more impressive than really delicious. The actual score of 91could improve significantly when this wine reaches its full potential, but as this was my last bottle I will probably never know..
March 14, 2024 - Probably some storage issue, this bottle is showing some aged wine plummy character in advanced, murky, drinkable but not at its peak.
March 13, 2024 - Solid, medium bodied. Old school. Lacking complexity. Wait 5-10 years.
February 10, 2024 - Decanted 20min. Floral, berries, currant. More berries than anything else. Really appealing. Mouthful of berries without being a heavy hitter. Elegant, focused. Had it just before Lagrange 2010. Some qualified Cantemerle as being more feminine. I would tend to agree. Rather refined and maybe more approachable than Lagrange as this time.
Really nice.
February 8, 2024 - Third from a lot of about thirteen bottles purchased at retail. Dark and glass coating still and showing a fat nose full of cassis and blackberry lined with leather as well as a touch of brett. Still a bit backward and flat on the palate, much like the last bottle, though it obviously had bushels and bushels of ripe cassis and blackberry in it. Unlike my first bottle from this lot, the acidity on this one was perfect, but with this bottle it was just hard to get excited about it. It was a nice drink, but it was not the exciting drink it once was. I suspect this has entered a phase of some sort between youth and maturity. There’s plenty of everything here to make a great wine, and Cantemerle can age a long time in good vintages, so we’ll just have to wait and see. 13% ABV (very good/***/16/91)