TN: '85 Guigal Côte-Rôtie Brune et Blonde

WINE TALK
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  • 1985 E. Guigal Côte-Rôtie Brune et Blonde - France, Rhône, Northern Rhône, Côte-Rôtie (4/25/2009)
    I picked this up on WineBid a few months ago and had no idea about its provenance, but it’s probably as close to a perfect bottle of this wine I could have hoped to find.

Beautiful, mature, textbook Côte-Rôtie that feels resolved on the palate yet still offers an abundance of fruit on the nose. The first sniff is classic bacon fat and violet, followed by earth, gamey roasted meat, smoke, pepper, and ripe red raspberries. Pure silk on the palate, with great balance-- vibrant acidity, sweet fruit, and faint tannins. The finish is long and lovely. This is not over the hill, but it’s probably perched at the summit.

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We have a winner! [cheers.gif]

My $18 bottle of 1996 Lanessan is pleasant and went well with the beef, but did not offer all that you found in your bottle! Good shopping!!!

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Hey, I’m always happy to find a good $18 pairing, so I’d say you shopped well too! I haven’t looked at the food posts yet, but did you have your asparagus with it?

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Yes, we blanched the white asparagus and I browned some butter and shaved parmesan over that. DH thought the asparagus needed a bit more cooking. Oh well. Good bread and terrific ribeye and filet mignon. Life is good.

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Day two: we had some left over and poured it back in the bottle with a vacu-vin seal. It really fell apart over night, and it’s very raisiny and “off” now. You might want to decant this for sediment, but do it gently and don’t give it too much air. It was at its best straight from the bottle.

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Never been a fan of the vacu-vin system. Try Private Preserve, or any of the other inert gases in a spray can.

Thanks for the note on the '85 B&B. I bought a case of this on release and it has been very educational to taste a bottle every couple of years. Lovely wine, disappointed early in its life, but it really blossomed after about age 10. I wasted far too many before I learned patience. I really love the 88’s, 89’s, and 90’s now.

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Hi Errol,

We don’t have a lot of leftover wine around here, but I’d like to try inert gas. We use vacu-vin mostly by habit.

Do you still have any 85s? Our bottle was from WineBid, so I don’t know its provenance. If so, would you say they’ve declined at all yet?

Thanks…

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I have found that with the success of inert gas, I feel better about opening a couple of bottles at a time knowing that they won’t go bad overnight (or even a couple of nights). Gassing and refridgerating is good for even longer.

I only have one left, and I have been saving it to revisit old memories one day, so my last bottle consumed was probably 4-5 years ago, and I remember it being perfectly mature. I would suspect that it would now be on a gradual decline, but still very enjoyable. I suspect that the the biggest impact of this wine being a bit beyond its best years was decline you saw after day one.