2013 Château de Saint Cosme Gigondas Valbelle

Community Tasting Notes (3) Avg Score: 91.8 points

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  4/15/2022 - Dmiller3 Likes this wine: 90 Points

  Perfection in a bottle

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  2/4/2021 - sid_loves_wine Likes this wine: 93 Points

  I don't have quite as much experience with Grenache in general as several other red grapes, but still enough that I feel I can give this an accurate assessment. I'm not 100% convinced of the QPR, 80 something dollars might be a lot for this level of general expressivity, but it was certainly fascinating and complex, an extremely old school wine in a number of ways and possibly my favorite Grenache I've yet tried, although it's also the most expensive.
  
  The nose started super interesting, certainly some reduction going on but lent itself really well to the character of the wine, revealing vivid smoked meat, black pepper, black licorice, iron, lapsang suchong, mocha, and the fruit was definitely buried by the savory tones to an extent, some lurking black plum and currants, just barely there but really pretty. Some sort of high-toned floral notes on the very top. Smells unbelievably french, if you know what I mean. Absolutely beautiful nose even if it was extremely tight.
  
  The palate was even tighter, a coiled fist of extremely gritty and dusty textured tannins. Thankfully the fruit and meaty tones were present enough here along with vibrant acidity that it didn't feel too harsh, but in general this could age for a ridiculously long time still, feels unbelievably armored and austere at this point.
  
  It did open up very slightly after about an hour in the decanter showing more precise fruit, but it did actually seem to close up after the 2-hour mark and refused to give up much of anything, seemed to enter sort of a dumb phase. Not only that, by day two it really clammed up in a weird way, yeah a little bit more fruit on the nose with maraschino tones but everything else had dropped off. Left over were some odd nutty notes that didn't work very well. I would say either drink this in a fairly short timespan once opening, or at least night one- otherwise let it sit for at least another 5 years, which would be preferable. I want to recommend having it with meats, but it was so tightly coiled that adding food to the equation also seemed to shut it down a little bit for now. Still giving a great overall score for complexity, uniqueness, and definite cellaring potential.

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  1/21/2018 - oropeza Likes this wine: 92 Points

  Red and black fruit up front. Chocolate and earthiness and black tea and oranges ("constant comment tea" she says) and herbal notes and slight meaty notes and... could keep going. Fantastic.

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