Great dinner recently with a couple friends. All wines bought on release and still in France. Drinking wines with true provenance really is a privelige.
Wines not decanted.
61 Montrose was first up. Beautiful, elegant nose. Not as giving as the other wines, but continued to improve throughout the night, which was impressive. Slightly leaner red fruit notes of sweet cherry. Very clean.
61 haut brion. A magnificent bottle. Lots of toffee, almost milk chocolate notes mixed with ripe, soft red fruit flavors. Fully open and amazingly steady throughout the night. Didn’t budge at all. Fantastic.
34 HB (from half bottle). Amazingly, this just kept improving and improving. It was in a dead heat with the 61 by the last glass. Even more dominated by dark coffee, espresso flavors. Just kept chugging along and opening up more and more. Beautiful.
55 bouchard bonnes mares. Half bottle as well.
Really nice. Not as spicy as some old burgs. More in the loose knit vein. Deliciousn with slightly darker fruit profile, but still safely on this side of the stewed fruit line. Interestingly, the sommelier, who has a lot of experience with these wines, said he preferred old bouchard ainee bottlings to bouchard pere. This isn’t a topic I have the knowledge to hold forth on, but i just thought the data point was worth passing on. I believe this was ainee but I’m not 100 percent certain.
67 yquem.
Beautiful, caramel color and flavor. Pretty open and mature to my taste. I might have preferred a touch more acidity, which i get more of in a vintage like 01. But delicious nonetheless.
Thanks for the great notes. I love the 61 HB. The 67 is my birth year but I agree with you on needing a bit more acidity. May be needing to cellar for another two or three decades!
Thanks for posting these. It’s nice to read notes on older wines I’ve actually had fairly recently. The 61 HB is a great wine and I also really like the 34. Still drinking well after all these years. The 61 Montrose is good but not in the same league as the HB IMO. I’ve not had the 55 Bouchard BM, but I have had several bottles of the 55 Ponnelle BM over the last several years and it has always been great.
You and I are on the same page: I had never had the old Haut Brions before, and I actually picked the 61 Montrose on the logic that I’d had a great bottle a few years back of unknown provenance, so I thought it would really keep up. But you are correct, it was a step behind the HBs. I think I must have had an inordinately good bottle the last time I had it, or just that it’s a solid wine and by itself, with no legendary wines stealing the spotlight, it seemed awesome.
I’ve had a lot of the old Ponnelles as well, and I would say they are a little different from the Bouchard. The Ponnelles are a little taughter, more of a tropical fruit profile with a little bit more bit and acidity. Personally, when they are good, I prefer the Ponnelles and that style.
The wine was probably bought in the 40s or 50s. To be more precises, perhaps I should have said just that it has been in the cellar many decades and is of known provenance. The point was simply to express that the bottles are a good reference for genuine, well stored examples of the wine to contextualize the notes.
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