WTN: '95 Montrose

[Jenise]

Opened this tonight to go with grilled lamb flank steaks and creamed cauliflower with mint:

1995 Château Montrose St. Estèphe Red Bordeaux Blend
Decanted for two hours. Red berries and black plums, herbs and a minor amount of tobacco. Fair amount of acid. Very good but not quite the complete experience I'd hoped for.

Very good but not quite the complete experience I'd hoped for.

Not an uncommon refrain re 95 Medoc.....

[David M. Bueker]

There have been a few fleeting bright spots (had a really nice Calon Segur a while back), but so far '95 is feeling charmless. It's only real virtue was being a competently good vintage after 4 pretty poor vintages. Nothing special.

I bought a fair bit of 95 Bordeaux for the exact reason David stated - it had been a long dry spell without much of interest after 1990. I went fairly large on the 95s although I had also bought some between 90 and 95 by carefully cherry-picking meritorious mostly right bank wines. I'll put this one on my to taste list to see if there is bottle variation at work (he said, hopefully...)

[Jenise]

The last one we opened was in 2014, and so this is what I went into last night expecting: Open and ready without decanting though time will soften and bring out more nuance. Big, heady and masculine with notes of tobacco, cassis and black cherry all day. As one taster put it, this is the Bordeaux you could pour for anyone and say, "Buddy, if you don't like this, then you don't like Bordeaux."

I didn't intend to wait this long to open another, it just got away from me. And then there's bottle variation. Bill hope yours is more like our '14 bottle.