March 23, 2024 - This has an unpleasantly bitter taste. It is full bodied with heavy extraction of sweet damson fruit. But the bitterness ruins it.
December 31, 2023 - This has always been one of my favourites and still is.
Still deep garnet colour with some bricking.
The nose is so enveloping, Intense classic ripe cabernet, it’s impossible to stop smelling it. Cassic, cigar box, pencil lead, eucalyptus. Wonderful.
Medium to full body, ripe sweet fruit, soft tannins. Totally fills the mouth with wonderful flavours of ripe aged Cabernet, extremely long and sweet aftertaste. Missing a little bit of acidity to balance the sweetness of the fruit otherwise would have close to a perfect score.
December 10, 2023 - Drank with prime rib for an early Christmas dinner. Drinking beautifully now. Dark fruits and anise on the nose with a mouth watering long finish. Drink it up if you have them.
July 2, 2023 - Great wine. Does anybody else have problems with cork breakage. All 3 9f the six that I have had the same problem. Use ah-so corkscrew.
December 4, 2022 - In a great place. Dark and deep, offering bright chocolate, black and blue fruits, hint of smoke and long finish. Caymus SS in 90s was really special wine. Drink now-2025.
October 26, 2022 - Really lovely. Needed time to open up.
September 7, 2022 - Acker Pre-Auction September 2022 (Redbury Lounge): Nope, not my style. It’s too big and bold and one-dimensional. Everything that I don’t really like about ‘97 California and that I can struggle with with Caymus.
August 24, 2022 - Same as two bottle back in 2019, this vintage continues to show a bit exuberant and highly intense with lots of spices and minty notes at its core. The intensity can be a bit tiring. Despite being technically clearly better than the Carmes HB 2000 (rated 93 pts) in the next glass (thanks to higher complexity, better precision and a good structural frame), I would go for the Carmes over the Caymus any day if I had to chose one bottle to drink alone. So the 95 pts for the one glass are well deserved but if I had to drink more of it, my score would probably be 91/92 pts… if that makes any sense…
TN: Medium+ expressive nose with smoke, spices, lots of mint and confit dark fruits. Well delineated and pleasing nose. Contrary to the nose, the palate shows very intense and expressive with loads of ripe but not too ripe dark fruits, a layer of fresher red fruits and bell pepper, lots of minty notes and a broad array of spices, with time even some fresher blue fruit notes too. Wonderful creaminess, good, medium+ acidity keeping it relatively fresh and light, melted tannins, but still lots of tension. Long and intense minty and dark fruit-driven finish. This is a complete wine but the intensity might be a bit overwhelming.
Decanting: Double decanted quickly three hours before consumption to remove sediment. This seemed perfect enough.
August 7, 2022 - Tasted blind. Precise and facetted aromas of tobacco pipe, mint, dark cherry, blueberry and graphite. In the background very fine layers of spice, savory, baking spice and just a hint of cinnamon. With aeration the aroma profile became perceptibly more sweet. The palate is nice and fresh with great structural tannin, albeit a bit mouthcoating in nature. In the end not as perfectly balanced and harmonious as could be and judging from this bottle a few more years of cellaring wouldn’t do any harm.
March 22, 2022 - Similar to other bottles over the past couple of years. This was the fourth bottle in a row where the cork broke in half. The wine was OK. However, it was still not up to what it should have been after a one and a half hour decant. One bottle left. Will open it earlier.