| Score: |
94 JG.
"This has always been one of my favorite wines of the vintage (I first tasted it back in the early 1980s while still in college and it was drinking brilliantly then), and it continues to cruise along beautifully at forty-plus years of age. The nose is deep and classic Haut Brion, offering up notes of sweet black berries, cassis, singed tobacco, black truffles, Graves earth, cigar ash and a pungent topnote of violets. On the palate the wine is typically medium-full (though this most recent bottle was quite powerfully built and vigorous- is it gaining weight at this advanced age or was it just a particularly pristine bottle?), lush and velvety, with beautiful focus and balance, a creamy core of black fruit, and a long, refined and soil-driven finish. Is there a claret more defined by its soil than Haut Brion, now that Ausone has fallen? A great vintage for Haut Brion. " John Gilman, View From the Cellar #9, Jun 2007 |