2009 Château Ausone
Community Tasting Note
Cailles wrote:
Wednesday, September 8, 2021 - 20 Vintages of Ausone (1986 - 2015): All wines tasted single blind. Ausone is a rare bird and hence, the term „once in a lifetime“ certainly applies to this tasting. A few oberservations: 1) Huge quality improvement in recent years: Only after 2005 I can see Ausone up there with the best Bordeauxs thanks to less oak, more depth and precision and a hightened elegance. 2) The high Cabernet Franc share in the blend (ever increasing) makes these wines quite unique, lighter and with more airiness and a darker fruit expression than most right banks. 3) The wines need a lot of time: Ausone is rather a late bloomer and does not provide as much early drinking fun as many of its right bank peers - especially the great vintages (05, 09, 10, 15). 4) The best wines with the highest scores were almost all off-vintages (a first for me). The highest scores went to 08, 06, 07, 14. These wines are weightless and show how great the big vintages will be once mature. Only the 05 was up there with the off-vintages. 5) Wine of the night and my best off-vintage Bordeaux ever was the 2008 (rated 98 pts).
TN: Rather muted nose which needed a bit of swirling to reveal some ripe, dark fruit. Not open and inviting. Same is true for the palate with dark berries, minerality and herbs. A wall of tannins will need a lot more years to soften and open up, gain creaminess and become lighter. A bottle two years ago showed much better (95 pts), so I guess this has shut down recently. Like the 2005 and 2015, this has a lot of substance and is quite promising but in this tasting it didn’t really show all it has in store. A bit more air might have helped here as witnessed by a bottle of the 2016 we had recently which needed a few hours of air to open up and showed brilliantly (rated 97 pts).
Decanting: Not decanted, not sure how much more air would have helped here. I would give it at least 3-4 hours in the decanter. Better just wait.
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