An excellent meal with two fellow berserkers. Sadly, the food was the best part.
1988 Daniel Rion Clos Vougeot - We popped and poured, which was a mistake since this badly needed a decant. Very nice aromatics, very fresh, red fruit and some florals and just a hint of mushroomy funk; I’ve had 2001s which show more evolved than this. But this has a load of acid - it easily crosses the line to shrill - and residual back-palate bitterness that may have resulted from stirred-up sediment (the wine was cloudy in the glass) but was out of balance with the generally feminine, high-toned nature of the rest of the bottle. This wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t close to a couple of late-80’s Pommards I’ve had in the last several weeks, and it didn’t say Clos Vougeot to me (more like “competent village wine”). Filled out a fair bit with air, but remained an “intellectual” wine - you had to like burgundy to like this.
1985 Caymus Special Selection - This is OK - cassis and cedar and relatively light bodied. Good varietal character. I’ve had some 1985s that were a bit roasted, but the fruit here is clean. 13.0% listed abv, if you can believe it, and not particularly oaky. Bears no resemblence to modern day Caymus SS other than that it is wine and it is red. But it has a faint sour twang that clips the finish, which IMO is the telltale sign of a Cal Cab that’s seen better days, and generally doesn’t distinguish itself from the sea of competently made mid 80’s Cal Cab that you can nab at the various online auctions for a third of the price. Poor QPR.
Not to make you feel bad, David/to give Anotn something to look forward to, but a couple of notes of my last two bottles of the Rion CV 1988 (I have a couple more):
7/15/08:. needs lots of aeration and some cleaning. Then very complex, masculine reddish fruits…excellent with meats and tannins largely resolved. no hurry whatsover
10/6/13:…this is mature, though barely. Very nice, masculine and tasty without being real hedonistic. True to the vineyard and ready to go…will certainly make 35 years, but drink over the next 10 Nice wine; nice vintage. Worth the wait.
FWIW
I do think aeration and cleaning are needed…big time.
Had a lovely Rion 1990 VR Chaumes this week…a beauty, and very lively/alive.
No doubt it would have been much better with aeration and decanting off the sediment, but I quite liked it as it was. I thought it much better than a competent village wine at age 26. Despite the structure being quite rich, it wasn’t the most intense or concentrated wine and didn’t have an especially lengthy finish, but it has held up well and I liked the complexity.
My impressions were very much like David’s, although the Rion to me was clearly several steps up from a village wine.
Corey had transported the Rion from the office, so the sediment was very much in suspension. I think this would have been a very different bottle if the sediment had had a chance to settle out and it had been decanted ahead. The bitterness at the back I think was due to the sediment. On the positive side, this was young and had a lot of depth. With some air, or more time in the bottle, I think this would have fleshed out so that the tannin and acid weren’t so conspicuous. It definitely improved over ~2 hours, and benefitted from food. You could see that the fruit was lurking there, but it just hadn’t had a chance to uncoil.
The Caymus was very pleasurable but not profound. It was ready to go from the start – much more approachable than the Clos Vougeot. Unlike the Rion, it did not benefit from air. It showed a little coffee note toward the end of dinner and seemed to be slowly cracking up.
I’d only eaten lunch once at Amali, but the food was terrific.
Maybe my expectations are too high because the Jadot and Lafarge bottles I recently had were so good. But you know how it is with burgundy - there are the bottles where everything clicks and it’s a hit, and then there are the rest of the bottles. This was clearly in the “rest”; it may have been at the very apex of the rest, but it wasn’t a hit.
I’m tempted to go back on Saturday with a nice white burg and see if they still have that lobster pasta as a special. Now that was a 95 point dish if there ever was one.
Separating out the sediment, which at 25+ and a tannic vintage, is likely to be from precipitated out tannins. They can mar any experience with a Burgundy (and other tannic reds) with any real age on them. So…either I’d used gravity to let that sink down and carefully decant off or…run the whole thing through a paper coffee filter…and hope that does the job without leaving the finer precipitate there to mar the experience.
IMO, bouncing a 1988 red to a meal with the sediment still in it…and then hoping for anything but problems/a bad experience is guaranteed folly. It’s not the wine here…but the prep that’s the problem, I’d bet. That the wine showed even as well as the note says it did confirms that for me.
I didn’t think the acid was shrill. I think there was bitterness from the sediment and remaining tannins and the fruit wasn’t showing because it needed more air. With air, I suspect the fruit and acid would have been nicely in balance.
Yes…I’d guess you are “right” here, John. The acidity might have seemed “shrill” because of all the other problems the handling/lack of prep created. So, the acidity, due to the stuff floating around and lack of aeration, had nothing to balance it out.
Sadly, it does seem like a waste of potentially great wine…from an outsider’s perspective.
About the only reliable description of the wine was the first sentence of David’s note.: We popped and poured, which was a mistake since this badly needed a decant.
To extrapolate much more, like that it was like a “competent village wine” was folly. A bit like asking Mrs. Lincoln to describe the play at Fords that night.
Gosh, I couldn’t disagree more. I thought the acid was shrill even as the wine got air. This was a wine that the somm literally jumped away from, it was so tart. The only way this was going to be in balance was a dollop of superfine sugar.
I disagree on the acid, and I can be put off by older wines with little fruit if the acid is too high. This wasn’t one of those to my palate.
It may not have helped that you were drinking it with lobster!
And how do you know the somm was recoiling from the acid rather than the tannin? (I didn’t see her recoil, but you may have been better positioned to see her.)
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