1996 Ch. Camensac, Haut Medoc
After meeting up with some visiting friends for brunch in a Lower East Side restaurant, I decided to walk off my full stomach by visiting, for the first time, the nearby Astor Wine Store. I picked up this lone bottle, with the “Last Bottle Sale - $26” tag and figured that it could provide an inexpensive reference point for some ’96 that I currently have.
Cherry red, with slight bricking at the rim and a nose of cigar, leather, wet earth, this is a decent Bordeaux with some nice red fruit, softened tannin and some very slight green and peppery taste that culminated with a 30 second finish. I’m quite unfamiliar with the producer and according to their website, the vineyard is just off Saint Julien and has Michel Rolland as a consultant. I don’t know how long the bottle had been sitting on the store shelves, and even as I suspect that it wasn’t stored at the most desirable of provenance, but for what it is, the wine was still more than decent and was able to exhibit some of that good mature Bordeaux quality. 90.
1996 Ch. Baret, Pessac-Leognan
I found this wine in a small roadside local delicacies store while vacationing in the Perigord last month. Purchased for Euro 15, I thought that it would contrast the deluge of very fruity local wines that we’ve quaffed on during the evenings as we wind down at our rented apartment. This producer is much more obscure to me than the Camensac – this is one that I’ve never heard of before. In any case, and although my recollection is that the wine showed fresher redness than the Camensac, it definitely revealed its more advanced age with the more pronounced leathery, old wood nose and some faded and dried remnants of the fruit on palate. Sweet soft tannin and devoid of acidity, this bottle was definitely past its prime. 88.
Cheers,
Ramon