The Auswine Forum

This is becoming cliche; yet another far from ordinary wine from an ordinary vintage - the Chateau Margaux 1981. A very deep black-purple core, ever-slight brown tinges and light bricking at the edges. Not perfectly vibrant, though very impressive depth of colour. Initially dumb, completely closed, so into a decanter for an hour, before going back into the bottle for the trip to the restaurant. Lovely nose, notes of sweet crushed dark blue and black berries, cedar, coffee and dark chocolate; very subtle vanilla toffee. First glass remains quite closed. Perfect balance on the palate, showing more weight than expected, dark crushed berry and coffee notes; very fine persistent gravelly tannins carrying a very long dark chocolate finish with those same soft vanilla tones. The wine continued to open, putting on weight and depth of flavour as each glass disapparead and the bottle dwindled ...very very fine, my only regret being the over-cautiously short breathing time given. Excellent.

Happy drinking,

Jakob

Good TN Jakob. Your bottle seemed like it had a long life ahead. i had a bottle of this from soemone else's cellar last year (VHS) and really liked it too but it was fully mature and started to descend after an hour. Good to hear there are still some good examples out of there as my best friend was born in this year and I am always on the lookout for 1981s.