What do folks recommend?
Thanks for your advice.
I had this wine about a month ago, and double decanted it and then let it sit at cellar temperature for 3 hours. The wine showed well at dinner, silky palate, nice complexity, dry finish with a touch of the “Cordier Funk” on the nose. Given the vintage, I think a minimum of a couple of hours of decanting is warranted.
When in doubt, decant any wine for 2 hours. I have never been burned on this generality.
Yup
I wouldn´t say that.
Quite a lot of wines can get a dry harsh edge when decanting without slow-oxing in advance … especially older Burgundies, but also Bordeaux and Syrah-wines … less so Grenache wines …
So I´d recommend to do at least a 3-4 hours slow-oxing (only pull the cork, maybe taste a small sip … pull back and let the bottle rest) …
decanting in this case 2+ hours afterwards … but preferably not double … and as softly as possible …
All IMHO of course …
I am not a fan of double-decanting. And for the wine I am most familiar with (Napa Cabernet), I think 2 hours only gets you into the game. I have had a number of older Bordeaux, and without a decant, most of them are best on the last glass.
Slow-oxing is not something I do. It was asked of me to do it at a dinner, so that all wine would be treated equally, and I did it. But for a very young wine, it hurt it. Of course I had a back-up with me, and almost to a person, we agreed the newly pulled cork yielded a superior wine to the one that was slow-oxed. So, what was the point of what I just said? Is that different wines at different stages of their lives react differently. So if you have experience with what a certain wine needs (or have a pretty good guess), follow your knowledge. But if you are on a wine board and asking for advice, so probably not intimately knowlegable about that particular wine, I’ll stick with give it two hours in the decanter. As I said, I don’t recall being burned by that wide blanket of advice.
I will say that in playing around with decanted wines, sometimes there is a wall you hit somewhere into the game. Instead of enhancing the wine, the time in decanter does bring out the harsh edge you mentioned. It resolves later on, but sometimes there are windows of opportunity, shall we call them.
I had this just 3 weeks ago. I opened three hours before serving, enjoyed a two ounce pour and deemed it good. It was a great wine and performed well against a lineup of FG’s, including the '89 Haut Brion. This wine is @ peak and if you prefer, it could be decanted 30-45 min before serving.
I know people around here talk a lot of trash and have a bizarre hatred for RP, but his simple non-scored note on this wine is one of my favorites:
Rating
NA
Release Price
NA
Drink Date
2000 - 2025
Reviewed by
Robert M. Parker, Jr.
Issue Date
30th Oct 1994
Source
95, The Wine Advocate
A Possible Legend Candidate
The 1986 is still too young to be sure.
I had this wine 2 years ago and we decanted off the sediment and drank about an hour later. It was indeed a legendary wine I’ll never forget. If I recall correctly, the back label gave way more info about the vinification than most labels do. Something like “racked every four months, fined with egg whites and bottled at XX months”
Anyway… Enjoy and report back.