TN: 2003 Bouchard le Corton

Third of six in 375 ml format.

PNP This wine is completely shut down. Let sit for 1 hr in big Riedel burg stems and it just started to soften it up to show a beefy, ripe but packed wine just starting to develop aromatics. I drank about half and put the rest back in the bottle and will revisit tomorrow.

What is interesting to me is the last two bottles (each about 3 years back) were much more approachable and developed, and now it has turtled big time. Did not see that coming. This is probably going to be a really long term wine. The quality is undeniable.

Revisited 24 hours later and it opened up nicely, but still a ways to go. Still a quite tight core of darker fruit. I don’t see the benefit of opening another bottle for a long time, so if you got them, let them continue to sleep.

I’m a fan of Bouchard Le Corton. It’s not the bargain it once was, so I don’t buy it like I used to, but it still seems like one of the better grand cru Burgundy values now that prices have gone completely insane. Not the most subtle wine in the world but it has a lot of richness, scale, and impact without being overdone or California-esque.

My limited experience with Corton is that you can drink it in the first 5 years…then you really need to wait 30 years before you’ll be “wowed” again. The ‘64 PFM Corton I had was one of the best I’ve enjoyed.

Had the 2005 from magnum this weekend and it was showing a lot of good stuff with some hidden power. The fact it was a great glass of wine made no sense to me. The above note about shutting down might explain it. It might be about to shut down.

+1. I never thought Corton was grand cru till I tried some 40 year old bottles from the 60s, Lionel Bruck being one.

Agreed - Corton is up there with Musigny for me when it comes to burgs that take the longest to strut their stuff.

This 2005 is fantastic, really special, we had it at a wine dinner at Eric Tomasi’s place back in summer 2017 and it was incredible. There was disagreement about whether it was great but “too young” or just great, I was in the camp that it is already terrific to drink now. Here is the relevant thread: