1996 Pahlmeyer Merlot

Community Tasting Notes (89) Avg Score: 93.0 points

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  4/20/2024 - aaslanian Likes this wine: 96 Points

  showing incredible fruit and color, love this wine.
  The body is medium/full. The wine has smooth texture. The wine finishes long. The wine has medium acidity.

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  3/17/2024 - AccaDacca Likes this wine: 95 Points

  Spectacular

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  2/21/2024 - Only Drink The Good Stuff Likes this wine: 99 Points

  I honestly couldn’t decide if I wanted to leave this note. I was very tempted to keep this information to myself. This is by far one of the best bottles of not just Merlot, but wine in general, that I have ever tasted. Yes I am a wine lover and collector. Yes I drink a lot of expensive and rare wine. It’s that good. Shockingly so. Bear in mind, the bottle I’m drinking from is a magnum. I’m not sure how the 750’s are holding up but this is absolutely spectacular vino! 28 years old and stunning. Makes me want to give Helen Turley a hug. All I ask is that if you ever see a magnum out there and you’re on the fence about buying it, don’t. Please leave it for me cause I’ll be looking.

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  8/19/2022 - sfwinelover1 Likes this wine: 94 Points

  Another brown bagger with palate and olfactory notes of black berries and cherries, hard to pin down red fruit, orange rind, plums, chocolate, funk and a light coffee note on the back end. Purple black, medium+ bodied, thick legs. Medium acidity ever so slightly separate, medium- tannins, no heat. Good+ complexity, intensity and persistence. Well, again, I underestimated age on this (as an aside, this group’s predilection for older wines was a great contrast for my more typical tasting friends’ tilt toward fresh off the truck quaffs) and, while I correctly placed this in the 707, thought it a CS-dominated blend (why am I so poor at perceiving CA merlots? Guess I just don’t drink them enough.). Similar in feel to the ‘96 Proprietary Red (and not dissimilar, to my palate, to wines she made Blanket around the same time), this wine, at this time, is drinking far more elegant than powerful, yet still has a vibrancy to the fruit I find too infrequently in BDX, and perhaps particularly, the Right Bank. Really enjoyed drinking this, although the WS price is a bit nosebleeding. The greater degree of acidity, perhaps tannins as well, makes me think that if I had both this and the PR around, I’d drink the latter first, but both seem to me, without tremendous familiarity with the bottlings, to be at or a bit past the peak of their drinking windows, although still delightful, and unless your cellar is cool enough for polar bears, I’d drink sooner than later. 93-94

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  4/23/2022 - soyhead wrote:

  tasted blind and offered up as a pairing to the '95 Margaux, but this was clearly riper and daresay sweeter. very sexy wine, but not nearly as bordeaux-esque as prior bottles. 'maybe this isnt really bordeaux' I blurted out. this was one time the patriarch couldnt fool me.

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