With Hart at our first anniversary at Claudine.

Revisiting our wedding wine (which I now have a stupidly large stack of).

This case was fascinating: the bottles arrive extremely “overfilled”. Barely any gap between the wine and the cork. In fact, pulling out the cork caused a fair bit of wine to splash outta the bottle.

This first bottle also came outta the gate roaring. Massive aromatics when I pulled the cork out.
We finally got to it after maybe 3ish hours of slow ox

Couple of observations: fresh off the bottle, this was intensely aromatic, with a big waft of tobacco, oak spices, leather, and black currant. Oddly enough, the black currant and blackberries took a while of breathing in the glass to come out.

This was very very different from the bottles we had at dinner, which was a lot plusher and fruit driven on the nose. Those were also had softer tannins.

Overall, this case feels a fair bit younger and less developed than the wedding cases. The oak here is perhaps a touch dominating. Let’s see how this develops.