Opened tonight for dinner to celebrate Wales’s run in Euro 16
As im sure everyone knows this was the KB that was WS #1, this was my last of six bottles all with perfect history and no issues.
The wine has to me aged badly since my last bottle about a year ago, now im sure some might consider a lowering of fruit and brightness in a pinot to be a good thing but thats not what you drink KB for, the wine has taken on a duller hue with slight browning around the ages, nose for me was very flat. Tasting the wine it has developed into what i call the milk chocolate phase, its still perfectly drinkable but the vibrant fruit has been replaced with a more mature fruit with a very slight masking of chocolate or cocoa flavours.
If you like your KB as full on cherry cola then i would certainly be thinking of drinking up any bottles of this age as they are not to me becoming soft and mellow more just old and dull. Of course i am the guy who can see the charm in mature burgs but does not seek them out at all.
I am going to pull my 11 & 12’s to start drinking over the next 12 months before they suffer the same fate
I stopped buying KB because I didn’t like how they aged - after three years they seemed to be a ghost of their former selves. Fruit gone. Color faded. Uninteresting or worse. Happy to drink someone else’s young KBs, but I’m out of that game.
I consumed my last bottle about nine months ago along with an 09 Aston/Schrader. We thought they were both singing then. I’ve had pretty good luck with 6-year old KB’s so far.
I’ve had good luck with most of the 08’s and 09’s that I have drank over the past year or so. I did open a 2010 KB SLH last week and was unimpressed. This was the first time I tried this. It just did not seem to meet what I normally expect in a KB, subdued nose, light fruit, with no balance. Not sure if it was not aging properly or just this particular SVD.
I like KB and still buy a small number per year. And I’m usually the champion of aging California pinots.
But I think KB is best in the first 5 years from the vintage or so. Not that it’s suddenly bad after that, but I think it’s better in its first 5 years or so. I think that would be especially true for a vintage like 09 or 12.