-
2002 Château Sociando-Mallet - France, Bordeaux, Médoc, Haut-Médoc (4/11/2009)
Dark color, youthful nose. Black fruit, pencil shavings, toasty oak, and a minty-herbal Fernet Branca type quality. On the palate this is both tannic and oaky, with a stemmy green herbal note at the back that Guillaume and Paul Jaouen both described on Facebook as asparagus. I wouldn’t have called it asparagus, but whatever it was, it was definitely there. This needs time. I have no experience with aged Sociando-Mallet. Does it age well? It seems like the structure is there, and if so, it’s probably a pretty good deal.
I feel like a lot of the '02s are in a rough place right now. This one is a good example of that. I get loads of charcoal, dried herbs, a weird medicinal characteristic and some burnt embers/tobacco leaf. I recommend forgetting about this for another ten years.
The medicinal quality you mentioned is what I called fernet branca, I think. It didn’t smell bad to me, just… unresolved.