Weingut Wegeler Rothenberg Riesling 2014 / Tons of peach and mandarin. Expressive and juicy. Spicy notes from orange peel. Beautifully textured on palate. Very juicy, energetic and soft. Vibrant and still so enjoyable. Complex and charmning at once. 92 points

The 2010 growing season was preceded by above average winter rainfall. Spring was mild with little frost damage and gave us an even budburst. The weather remained cold and wet through spring, which held back growth until a two-week high 30s heat wave in November affected flowering and fruit set. Spring rains continued into early summer right through until mid-December, making it the wettest year since 2005. The vines responded to the heat and grew vigorously until early January, developing lush canopies, but bunch development suffered as a result. A roller-coaster ride of heat spikes and cool changes continued through a warm summer with occasional thunderstorms. The vines went through veraison a week earlier than 2009. Lower yields coupled with the mild ripening period resulted in concentrated fruit. Vintage began a week earlier than 2009 and was in full swing by mid-February. The white vintage was all but finished a month later while the red harvest continued with deeply coloured, well-balanced grapes being picked during mild, dry conditions until the end of April.

Louis Roederer Cristal 1996 (Magnum) Absolutely stunning nose of great complexity, enticement and elegance which evolved beautifully in the glass.  Still lean and elegant as you would expect from the vintage. Immensely satisfying with plenty of time to go although it is difficult to imagine how it can continue to improve.  For once a Cristal that exceeds expectations!. Impressive.  The bottles tasted were also excellent.  19.5

BORDEAUX VINTAGE 2016 / Tasting "en primeur" is a challenge every year. The wines tasted are showing a tendency only and it is still the beginning of a longer process of evolution and maturation in the barrels. There might be some changes during the next year and a half until the wines will be bottled, but already today the tendency is quite clear. For most of the red wines it will be an outstanding vintage, a vintage for Cabernet, old vines, limestone and clay soil. It was a challenging year for the vintners. An incredibly wet spring was worrying the winegrowers and at the beginning of June, the spirits were down. However warm and dry weather between June 3 and June 11 creating an close to ideal situation for the flowering and good weather conditions starting in mid June changed the nature of the vintage. The fine weather continued into July and August. The month of August was featuring hot weather and a remarkable amount of sunshine but the absence of rain let to water stress. Heavy rain in mid September set an end to water stress and when the sun returned on September 20 the vintage was saved as there was excellent weather till to the end of the harvest. The effects were various. the white wines are on a good quality level and display fruit and flavour but the acidity is lower than in previous vintages and the white wines show an opulent and rather soft style. The noble sweet wines are extremely pure and are more on the rich and powerful side than on the freshness. For the red wines originating from the right terroirs and old vines, the vintage an be called outstanding. Water stress was managed well on limestone and clay terroirs, Cabernet varieties did extremely well and old vines found water even during the stressful dry periods of summer. In some few red wines the tannins are slightly harsh, almost bitter, a result of water stress and/or intense extraction. In general the red wines are on an excellent level with an advantage for the left bank, mainly the Médoc area, and the classic great terroirs of Saint-Emilion and Pomerol. 

Château Montelena vertical with Bo Barrett!

Château Haut-Brion, Péssac-Léognan, France, 1989, 100pts. Perhaps the most harmonious wine I have ever tasted. This wine had it all - just perfect and sensational. This wine is just from another planet!

2010 Parker Coonnawarra Estate First Growth Cabernet Sauvignon, Connawarra

Dark ripe Cabernet nose with leather, plum, mint, strawberry jam. Beautifully textured on palate with juicy sweet fruit, velvety tannins, a certain note of drier fruit like prunes and some woody notes. Classical and aristocratic texture with great complexity and length. Warm, ripe and big, but very finely balanced and precise with a great varietal expression. 95p

Let’s talk Bordeaux. The Commander brought two gorgeous ‘82s which were both singing. L’Evangile, which is now owned and run by Lafite, and Trotanoy, which is owned and run by the Moueix family (aka Petrus) remain two of the best buys in all of Bordeaux, and these two wines showed why. The L’Evangile had sexy aromas and flavors of plum, olive and chocolate, and while still a bit tight, it was thick and delicious. The Trotanoy was a bit more open, dare I say sexier in its nose, showing blacker fruit and great autum floor action. It may be maturing a touch faster than the L’Evangile, but I found them qualitatively equal. The 1985 Petrus has never been considered a great Petrus, but out of double magnum, it came damn close. It was another sexy Pomerol nose, with more wheat and dust, along with touches of purple marzipan. The palate was rich and beautiful, w ith hints of olive and plum, and richer and more tannic than I expected, probably thanks to the larger format as much as anything else.

Our host in Mississippi, Norm Rush, opens a lot of wine from his cellar. It is one of the reasons that 30+ winemakers keep returning every year!

Penfolds Grange 2004 / Now here is a challenging wine to review. The reviewers are swooning, the faithful are lining up at the Magill cellar door, even the mainstream press is giving it coverage (great to see, more please). In short, it is a ‘loaded’ wine: A bottle of fermented grape juice that comes so full of preconceptions, myth & mystique that actual tasting notes are redundant with reviewers serve to only agree or disagree with the greatness.

So, at first, I thought I would just not score this, to be a self righteous knob and just rattle off some descriptors and the odd opinion, before leaving a hole where the score would be at the end. But, instead, I sat there trying to work out what, if anything, was wrong with it. Approach a tasting with the idea that all wine is perfect until proven not. Its actually great fun, but also seems counter intuitive with the whole critical tasting idea. In the end, I decided that if you were to hold up a wine as the model for The Ultimate Young South Australian Shiraz, you couldn’t really go wrong with this.

Purple, dark red in colour. Sweet, malted coconut oak, interwoven with really bright red fruit, like a raspberry bounty & just a smidgen of (classic for Grange) VA. Cocoa. Black fruit. Impossibly youthful. Actually, it reminds me a lot of the 2005 Moss Wood on the nose, with it’s surreal, sweet youthful fruit and oak amalgam. Its a purity of fruit and well judged oak at its zenith, and its hard not too love. I think, however, that as a young wine, many European palates would find this too sweet. Leave it for a decade before serving it to the Poms then.

On the palate, well, it is drier, deeper and blacker than the sweet nose, much like 70% dark chocolate. Palate wise its red/black fruit dominant and utterly Penfoldian in its firm, quit sweet tannins. It’s sweet, but so structured and balanced that it feels velvety. Velvety like Burgundy. Effortless softness that is so seductive that you don’t notice the tannins, even though they hang in the background, ready to kick. I think that’s called balance. And it makes this wine the hero that it’s purported to be.

So in the end, in my quest to examine this wines perfection credentials, I really couldn’t find much wrong with it. Perhaps its a bit too sweet, otherwise it really is a brilliant South Australian Shiraz. The only question, perhaps, is whether it is ‘that much’ better than the 04 St Henri. And that question is largely answered by your wallet…97 p