Community Tasting Note

campingfleurie wrote:

Friday, November 5, 2010 - I’ve been ducking my French ‘05s for more than a year; convinced they’d all be utterly closed. I’m going to have to trust my own TNs more though (see Feb ’08), because (whilst, yes, I Bordeaux-decanted for 3 hours) this wine came out immediately as utter rock and roll; majoring on crashing cymbals. Sour red-purple fruits, fig-paste (a spot-on descriptor from a TN below), and a tonne of other spices. The concentration, the brightness, the layers (just beginning to split apart – rather like drinking actual slate): so absurdly superior to the mainstream. Has dropped most of the original dark-fruit cloak, and is starting to major on the AOC typicity of that red-purple fruit and the herby Mediterranean crops. But this wine is seriously unique (I’ve never tasted anything like it) in terms of how it’s delivered: it’s presumably a Janasse-2005-expression thing. Tongue-tanging serious brilliance. The style of the tannins and the acids are so well-matched to the flavour delivery: just wow. I mean, tannins usually dullen or cut, but here they’re a major part of the wine’s pounding vitality. Maybe, just maybe, this style, this poise, is this wine’s peak: maybe the tannin will not ease in proportion to how the fruit goes on to fade. For once I’m not too stressed about that right now: this is addictive wine. 91 to 93, 93. S was even less stressed: when I told her the wine would probably "improve, with age, by softening”, I got an unequivocal, unprecedented response: “You are wrong”. She utterly loved it. One final thing to say is that the alcohol is part of all the intensity and electricity here. Therefore it is, unfortunately, unavoidable. I say unfortunately, because this is shattering, deafening, dehydrating wine; and we didn’t drink the whole bottle.

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