Birthday bottle for my lovely wife!
Stood it up 24 hours ahead of time to let the sediment settle at the bottom.
Brought it to Lazy Bear in San Francisco to pair alongside the vegetarian tasting menu.
Worked with the sommelier to decide the right treatment and we decided on slow ox, which turned out to be the right approach. Fill level was great and cork was in solid condition (it did need a Durand).
In contrast, we had a 1986 Mouton Rothschild earlier this year and that drank better with decanting than slow ox. Sometimes, there isn't one right approach, it depends on the bottle and your instincts.
Let it breathe for about an hour before drinking (had a mini-Spring Mountain Cab vertical beforehand, I'll share notes for that separately).
This drinks remarkably young with grippy tannins.
This is still pretty fruit-forward, with red cherry, blueberry, and cherry pits, alongside a slightly-perfumed nose with gulkand (rose petal preserves), clove, and elaichi (cardamom).
Over the course of dinner, this become a little more savory and tertiary, with slight celery and vegetal notes coming out, alongside bell pepper and tomato leaf.
This is an absolutely beautiful wine that's likely drinking at its peak, but also has a long life ahead. And it played beautifully with the earthier vegetable dishes on the tasting menu.
My recommendation is to open it for an hour before drinking, but avoid decanting, assuming bottle is in good condition.
Also, fun note on the label, the art is by Georg Baselitz, a German artist. It depicts two upside-down Rama to symbolize the fall of the Berlin Wall. The words below read “Drüben sein jetzt hier”, roughly translated as “Over there is now over here.”
94 points.
by rnjbond
5 Comments
I keep hearing the 1986 is “bad”
And that it was generally a terrible year
So I understood correctly that it wasn’t (at least from your perspective?)
Love 89 Bordeaux!
Lovely story, beautiful description of the wine. A little nuance with the translation from German. “Drüben sein jetzt hier” is not “Over there is now over here”, it’s a little more poetic than that. The proper translation would be something like “Over there will someday, which is now, be here”.
So two differences from your translation: In the German text there is no “over there” and “over here”, there is only “here”. Furthermore, the use of the word “sein” is futuristic. Meaning it will be like that someday. The use of the word “jetzt” (meaning now, at this moment) is the poetic part. That someday-far-out-the-future-Utopia is now. And probably, this bottle was bottled around the time of German unification (1991), and thus they must have known at the time, how significant the fall of the Berlin Wall turned out to be.
I’m writing this, being full aware this is a wine sub and not a German language sub, because the translation really captivates the spirit of the time of this wine. Which to me is one of the pleasures of drinking aged wine. It’s a time capsule.
Mouton, in my experience, holds onto its fruit longer than the other first growths, except for maybe Latour. I tasted the 88 at work this year and it was still so fruit-forward right after it was opened – crazy stuff!
‘89 is also my birth year! This is a serious birth year wine!
I had an ‘89 Cantemerle this year that was still quite good.