I grabbed 3 of these at a recent auction held at The Wine Auction Room here in Auckland,
I decanted the bottle into a Jancis Robinson old wine decanter (tall and narrow) and drank it out of a Vinum Extreme.
The nose explodes out of the glass with the smell of sweet aged pinot and hard candy, the first sips reveal a compressed palate of sweet fruit leaning up against an unintegrated wall of high quality well toasted wood.
I let the decanter sit for an hour while I pondered reverse osmosis and really toasty oak…
After an hour the nose has moved to an amalgam of green Irish moss and baby shit while the palate is starting to come into focus and the wood is becoming less obvious.
2 Hours in and the nose has changed to a confit of small red berries and forest floor, the palate has lengthened and added a lot of depth with the oak taking a minor support role to obviously high quality fruit.
Very nice bottle of wine in the end, and I think not quite at its peak and for my palate could do with a further decade to develop some more nuance and slightly better integration.
Nice Marcus. I like tasting these along side his 1er Reas as they reflect his style against the two vineyards. Michel certainly has his RO machine which he shares with some of the family, but the oak you note I suspect may have been the slightly more roasty/ coffee Brulees characteristic, as his is not an really a woody style.
I drank my last '01 in 2017. I still have some '02’s.
Maybe, but it was more the level of toast that was apparent as opposed to raw oak, I have no problem with his style and as I said in the note the wine was very good after a couple of hours of air