1989 Château de la Gardine Châteauneuf-du-Pape – I enjoy the wine though I absolutely loathe the bottles, which make it impossible to stack in a bin. If you haven’t seen one, it looks as if they designed it to be an irregular polygonal shape that is completely unstackable on their sides. The next worst bottles are extra long Alsatians or German wines that sit stacked for long periods before suddenly casting themselves into the abyss in a last suicidal attempt at freedom, usually crashing down on something much more expensive in a bin lower down (I foiled them by placing thick strips of foam rubber cut from insulation batts under the necks)
This is a tasting note on a wine I didn’t know I had. When I moved four years ago, we organized the new cellar (two people on laptops cataloguing and two of us stowing wine according to the plan I had come up with). We were pretty accurate but obviously couldn’t check every single bottle.
I wanted to try a bottle of the 1995 Ch. de la Gardine to see how it was coming along. To my surprise the bottle I pulled from the bin said 1989 on it instead! I doubt I’d have kept that particular bottle this long had I known about it but the only thing to do was pull a cork and see what it was up to.
A little bit in the glass to assess colour showed a fairly light tint akin to a mature Burgundy, though it seemed much darker when poured in more volume. The nose was old mature fruit and forest floor – mushroom and herbs. It was well balanced, had sufficient fruit and was an elegant wine showing a slight astringency at the end, which was medium long. A bit of tar showed up in the nose after awhile and the wine seemed to take on weight and complexity as it was allowed to oxidize. We drank it over a couple of hours as there was no point keeping it around until it inevitably crashed
