1987 Chateau Musar

Community Tasting Notes (25) Avg Score: 92.9 points

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  5/17/2023 - sharonandroland Likes this wine: 96 Points

  Musar in its best fashion. Great balance between freshness, funk, VA evolution and this ethereal overlay. Long deep, pensive. True to Serge!

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  3/24/2020 - johnrm Likes this wine: 94 Points

  We have stored the wine since release. The level was just above the bottom of the neck. Cork needed my trusty 2-pronged 'waiter's friend' but it stayed intact. Opened, left for 3 hours, decanted, then tasted after another 2-4 hours. Lighter colour but still rich and not browning as much as expected. Great nose and an exceptionally soft and smooth palate full of complex sweet fruits - from cherry and plums to raspberry ice cream and honey/caramel with a touch of 'Cape gooseberry' (not conventional gooseberry, heaven forbid). Lots of subtle, soft spice. Great mouthfeel and a long ending that developed wonderfully as it lingered. Difficult to describe the complexity and evolution in the glass. Good with food but, again, an incredible bottle to sit with and savour on its own over time. This was opened on my birthday, celebrated with my wife on a lovely sunny UK evening. We are isolated at home owing to Corvid19 and cannot celebrate at one of our favourite restaurants. This was our last '87. We will miss this vintage.

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  9/8/2019 - sharonandroland Likes this wine: 93 Points

  Light and Burgundy like

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  6/7/2019 - sharonandroland Likes this wine: 94 Points

  Feminin, high in alcohol, great evolution.

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  4/3/2019 - straight outta iowa Likes this wine: 92 Points

  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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