Community Tasting Notes 2

• rnellans wrote: 93 points

  January 8, 2024 - What a surprise! Mature, elegant, still some fruit and got better with air.

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• ledocq Likes this wine: 93 points

  August 23, 2015 - The score? Arbitrary. I could have picked a 92 or a 94 just as well. The question you'll have if you encounter a bottle in the wild is "might it still be any good?" The answer: hell yes. If you find some of this and it looks like it was stored well, take the plunge. This is my third 1960s classified Bordeaux and it was easily the best (the other two, a 1964 Haut Brion and a 1966 Latour, were both in different ways rather tired). I have noticed tasting notes for 40+ year old Bordeaux cite leather and spicebox and tobacco -- sure, why not. I suppose this tastes like that. I did not separate components out -- this was just a full-on inchoate, inexpressible experience that in a way isn't finished yet.
  
  I am starting to understand that very good Bordeaux begins to share a common thread as it gets older, and this bottle was right on the beam that way, a post-fruit, post-exuberance, mellow, lengthy, hypnotic gaze into vast natural processes like growing sequoias, the ocean etching into sea glass, a river turning granite into canyon. I kept thinking "fifty years ago, this tasted like a grape, then it tasted of fruit, then it probably shut down, then it had secondary characteristics and now it shares more in common with the '64 Rioja I had than with any wine made after 1982." If you think of Bordeaux aging like a spectrum, this is into the ultraviolet of taste, something so far beyond the visible that it taxes the imagination to describe. This is what the view from Pluto looks like.
  
  The image on CT of this bottle is the bottle I drank - it has the Cruse sticker on it. The fill was shockingly high, just too the neck, and we wondered if it was refreshed at some point. Maybe. But the cork was a freakin' disaster, so maybe not.
  
  Served at Park Tavern, SF, by a very nervous somm who took a good five minutes to get the cork out (soaked, intact) and who noted that he was afraid to decant it. Good idea. We had small pours all night. The aroma was that vivid old motorcycle jacket and men's club kind of thing, and the opening taste surprisingly just a tiny bit tannic. But then it opened up (hey there, TRUFFLES!) and my companions and I -- both of them very experienced with elderly wines -- were excited. This was easily the best Bordeaux from the '60s they'd had, too. Great with blue cheese and some manchego-like sheep cheese. I worried it was going to die, but 90 minutes later, it was still good -- but sure, it was fading a little. At the end there was so much sediment we probably had to give up an ounce or so to Bacchus, but really, not a problem.
  
  As I think about it more, I realize too that this is not the ultimate wine experience for me. In other words, I don't think my 2010 Bordeaux is going to be most enjoyable in 2059 -- as many others have already pointed out, one of the joys is exploring what it means as a wine progresses along that spectrum from infrared grape to ultraviolet gerontology.

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Wine Definition

• Vintage 1966
• Type Red
• Producer Château Pontet-Canet
• Varietal Red Bordeaux Blend
• Designation n/a
• Vineyard n/a
• Country France
• Region Bordeaux
• SubRegion Médoc
• Appellation Pauillac

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• Pending Delivery 0 (0%)
• In Cellars 25 (51%)
• Consumed 24 (49%)

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