With Hart, YZ, Sloke, Sean and Tabs at mine. Bottle from YZ.

TLDR: still an absolute baby that either needs several more years in the cellar, or a monstrously long decant (not just slow-ox; proper decant for at least 4-5 hours).

In the glass: this deep rich ruby with just a touch garnet at the rim. Mid bodied with a fair bit of translucence.

On the nose: just extremely tight and meek. There’s hints of blackcurrant, sweet oak, blackberries, sweet vanilla. The nose stayed very meek throughout most of dinner, perhaps right until the edge of the last 5 hours. It eventually started opening up more, and the Merlot finally gave up its sweet red plums.

On the palate: this was orders of magnitude more impressive than the nose. There was this sheer intensity of red and black fruits. Palate coating. And very fresh mid++ acidity that made my mouth water. Wine was very very fleshy, and had a good amount of structure still. My biggest reservation about the wine was the finish, which went on, and then had this weird abrupt drop off. YZ mentioned it got longer with air, but I’m not sure I had the same observation.

As the night drew on, the main note that intensified over the rest was of course the sweet red plums, and there was the emergence of a cocoa on exhale.

I’ve had very poor luck with 2009 and 2010s in the past couple of years, especially for the higher classified winemakers. Not that the wines are flawed; more that most of them seem to be in this really weird closed down phase. I would just leave them alone for a few more years before checking back in again