WTN: 1989 Château de Beaucastel Châteauneuf-du-Pape

• 1989 Château de Beaucastel Châteauneuf-du-Pape - France, Rhône, Southern Rhône, Châteauneuf-du-Pape (12/22/2007)
  Bottle had a low fill and some signs of leakage. Color -- still very dark, not much bricking. Complex bouquet with a background of Rhone dirt. Mouth filling black cherry, velvety tannins. Long finish. Beautiful wine with a long life ahead of it.

Posted from CellarTracker

In 2000 I was already sliding down the slippery slope of winegeekdom but was at the very top of the cliff. I tasted this wine at the winery and have been lost ever since....

Also barrel tasted the 1998 at that time.

I'll always have a soft spot, as it was Beaucastel that tipped my scale to full wine geekdom. I remember "splurging" on the current vintages in the mid-90s at $35-40/bottle. Now, if I had only cellared some of those.

But I've been having fun backfilling. I'm building a nice little vertical...

Glad you got a good one. You probably know the famous story, a big load of '89 Beau came into Newark one warm summer day, and that's when the strike started. So one has about 50/50 chance of getting a non-cooked one, but the good ones are really tasty!

[Jenise]

Michael, I'll piggy back on your note:

WTN: 1989 Chante de Perdrix, CdP
Also had signs of past seepage. The cork came out whole and with a slight tug, but was completely saturated. Smelled good, though. Poured a small tester glass and decanted to pull the wine off the sediment, then returned to a rinsed bottle and re-corked the wine for dinner out of concerns that this less-than-pristine bottle could fall apart quickly. Color was of a mature wine but had some purpleness to it, which seemed a good sign, and tasted of dusty plums, earth and green olives. It seemed to improve somewhat in the glass, too, and on its own was very good as aged wines go, but not excellent. However, I had taken this to someone else's house and, lucky me, the main course was chicken mirabella--chicken marinated and braised with wine, green and black olives, and prunes. And here, the wine was outstanding: there could not have been a better food for the wine and vice versa.