April 23, 2023 - Jason's birthday: Brought for a friend. The colour was worryingly cloudy and pale as the previous notes mentioned, but thankfully the palate was fine. Typical NSG brawniness with firm and structured tannins, dark fruits and sous bois. Nice length and a good example of an older Burgundy in its drinking window.
April 23, 2023 - J's Birthday Dinner (Taste Paradise Ion): Blinded. Cloudy ruby, sour cherry, forest floor, tobacco, high grippy tannins, fully body lots of structure with a bitter finish.
April 23, 2023 - Mature color. Plenty of structure and dry tannins, a bit rough on the finish, wouldn’t win any finesse award. Just an okay wine. Middle of the pack in tonight’s tasting. Being a Vacucrains, there is hope the tannins may smooth out eventually, +1 point for that possibility.
March 10, 2023 - Extremely cloudy bright ruby colored robe. Nice fruit and balance.
November 19, 2022 - From a bottle purchased on release, this had deep red center with oranging rims. Medium+ intensity nose of black cherries, pomegranate, tan spices, and some plum.
In the mouth, ripe and rich with notable rounded tannin, decent acidity, and good length. While a bit fruity and somewhat monotoned at first, this developed well after 4+ hours of air and showed an attractive firmness in the finish.
In my view, this wine is still a bit young and it may improve by a point or so with another 5-19 years in the cellar
October 1, 2022 - TCA- bummer
February 22, 2022 - An excellent expression of the Vaucrains terroir with the stony minerality and dark fruits. With the decades of cellaring, the texture has become satin, although there are still some tannins on the finish so that you know this is NSG, and in particular Vaucrains. 93-95 potential for the near- and medium-term future. Cellared since original release.
August 10, 2021 - 3 of 5 Served blind alongside a 1996 Laurent NSG Vaucrains This bottle was jostled just before opening and the wine was cloudy with the wines very fine sediment. That being said the nose and palate were consistent with my prior note.
June 13, 2020 - We let this sit in a decanter for an hour, it had quite a bit of sediment. It’s been a year since I last enjoyed this wine and it edges further into early maturity. More open bouquet of dark fruits, fine tannins have further softened, nice acidity and freshness, texture and finish bring you back for another sip. It’s added some complexity since last year and has more to come over the next decade. Drinking very well indeed.
June 18, 2019 - Cloudy. Medium garnet in color. Nose is muted. Thinking about it now, this may have been slightly corked. It was just too shy and we had it against the '95 Les Cailles which was singing. There was a note of wet basement which blew off after 20 minutes. I wish we would've given this more time. It was decanted poorly by the server as well. He shook it. The fruits are darker, with blackberry and black cherry, wet leaves, leather, tobacco leaf. More masculine than its counterpart. On the palate, it is medium bodied, alcohol is in check, tannins are still very perceivable and further aging will be required to tame them. It comes off a bit rustic. Finish is short. Not totally impressed by this, honestly. Hope my last bottle is better.
NOTE2SELF: Decant and audoze for at least 3 hours next time. Lots of sediment in this wine.