Score: |
96 JG. "The 1970 Trotanoy is a great vintage for this fabled château, though it is a vintage that has taken its sweet time in maturing. At age thirty-six it is just now really beginning to show all of its fine constituent components, and offers every possibility of delighting the senses for the next fifty years. It seems clear that this is the last old styled vintage of Trotanoy, as the 1971 and 1975 are much more polished examples of this fine terroir than is the 1970 and the vintages that preceded it. We had a pair of 1950 right bank wines after the flight that included the ’70 Trotanoy, and those two old school wines clearly showed the 1970 Trotanoy to be cut from that same cloth. The bouquet is deep and old-fashioned in the best sense, as it offers up a mélange of plums, blood oranges, chocolate, tobacco, woodsmoke, a bit of venison and damp earth. On the palate the wine is full-bodied, deep and broad-shouldered, with great purity now emerging (this was hardly the case with this wine even five years ago). The core of the wine is rock solid, the tannins ripe and well-integrated, but still substantial, and finish long, complex and rapier-like in terms of grip and intensity of flavor. This is a profound wine that I had my doubts about ever emerging from its chewy adolescence with anywhere near this degree of breed and complexity, but the ’70 Trotanoy has now begun to reach its plateau of maturity, and is poised to take its rightful place amongst the very finest wines of this excellent vintage." View From the Cellar, Jul/Aug 2006 |