Opened in honor of RMP beginning to pass on WA’s Bordeaux coverage.
This is a big, powerful Bordeaux, with very dark fruit and something flowery in the nose. At the end of the day, it’s also not really my style, though I can see where someone else might be impressed. It is definitely a flamboyant wine, but the first taste was a little overwhelming and disjointed. It came together a little bit better with aeration. Deep, dense, rich fruit in the mouth and hints of something floral in the nose.
I would have a hard time paying the asking price for this wine again. My biggest issue with it is that, under all the rich fruit, there’s considerable levels of dry, coarse tannin - which takes me back to so many of my 03 issues in Bordeaux and elsewhere in France. The wines got “ripe,” but sugars far out-paced everything else, so under the big, booming flamboyance, something is missing. There’s something hollow.
This wine is a monster…I feel it has substantial structure and copious amounts of oak yet I never noticed any signs of hollowness…nothing about this wine appears traditional nor does it taste like California contrary to other past comments…more like a crazy ripe bordeaux with just a bit of a clipped dry finish…tasted 2x’s…one bottle was enjoyable, another was not
I guess it seems like the structure dominates middle the wine in a way that I really didn’t like, and in a different way than you get from something like Barolo. It was coarse, and to my palate, didn’t bode well for the wine becoming better with age.
I do agree that this didn’t make me think of Napa/California. I thought of some 09 Saint-Emilions I really liked - Pavie-Macquin, Canon-la-Gaffeliere and Beausejour Becot - all wines that are ripe, exotic and flamboyant, but they all had a seamless quality that this wine lacks. The mask slips, you can see the make-up, it’s a theatric wine that doesn’t pull off the act.