1987 Chateau Musar
Community Tasting Note
straight outta iowa Likes this wine:
Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - I get excited when my wife revisits her Mom's recipes, and I always get a kick out of pairing wines with the cuisine of their homeland. So the other night when she told me it would be Sheik ‘al Mehshe (eggplant/lamb/tomato/pine nuts) for dinner, I went looking for the 1987 Musar to accompany it.
I had tried this one once before, from the same batch, and it was a rare Musar disappointment. Storage issue, I assumed. As I gently tugged on the cork of this one, it crumbled and broke, and when I finally removed it the wine had a little more brown tint to it than I expected. "Again? Damnit!" I thought to myself. Or, as they might say in the Bekaa Valley: "Haram!"
But Musar has a track record of surprising me. After about an hour it unfurled into the unmistakable character to which I have grown accustomed. Spicy, funky fruit, long and well balanced, that I usually think of as a cross between Rioja and the Northern Rhone -- even though of course Musar has neither syrah nor tempranillo. The fruit is fading a bit, but the wine is 32 years old. Even if nowhere near my favorite Musar, the wine was highly enjoyable. (No doubt the pairing helped.) The 1986 remains my all-time favorite, and the 1990, 1993 and 1995, tasted in recent years, have been near that level as well.
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