Had a blind tasting with five people, normally the group is a bit bigger but we had a lot of fun. The following wines were the nicest we had:
2000 Trimbach Cuvee Frederic Emile Vendange Tardive: Gold yellow. In the nose a very typical smell which I thought I recognised immediately as ripe Alsace Riesling. Ripe pineapple, I also wrote “petrol” down but when I had another glass of this later on the evening I can’t say I really smelled petrol. I say thought to recognise because there was more to this nose than in the smell of the CFE 1998 I had last week. It was more multilayered with also a floral component, just very pretty. In the taste this wine blew me away, it was luckily not what I expected from the nose. It was elegant, it was fun to drink, it was in perfect balance. The wine had residual sugar but it was no dessert wine. Perfect to drink with some nice fish or as aperitif even. Very balanced good bottle of Riesling. I’m not sure of the price of this wine but for my palate I prefer this by a long distance to the regular CFE that I have drunk.
2004 Castello di Ama Chianti Classico: Not to dark in colour, red and a bit transparent. This wine had a nice bouquet, nutmeg, plumbs, a ‘soft’ nose. The first sip the wine displayed an acidity that is for me typical for Sangiovese and which I normally dislike a lot. This wine had the acids but it was not disturbing me and as the evening went on and I had another glass of this I really liked it. I liked it more than the rest of the group but I thought it was an extremely elegant and soft bottle of wine. A style I normally don’t like especially with Sangiovese but this wine had enough fruit and just gave me a wonderful drinking experience.
2000 Vergelegen Red Stellenbosch: Dark coloured. When you smell this wine you get a warm feeling inside. I got some Sambal on the nose, something I get often with older Bordeaux that are a bit over the top, but this wine was no where near being over the top in everything else it displayed. I also had a smell of earl gray tea and herbs on the nose.
In the mouth it was very powerfull and fullbodied. The wine gave at start a sweet impression but ended with a dry finish. The wine had a fairly long and powerfull finish with some milk chocolate notes for me. A nice wine but I feel I liked it more because I brought it myself so I gave it more attention than I might have given it when someone else had brought it.
Nice tasting and another learning experience. I normally dislike Chianti’s I taste and I never had a VT of Trimbach. Last tasting we had the same guy who brought the VT Trimbach brought a Trimbach SGN 1989 Gewurztraminer and I thought that was a brilliant bottle as well. So thanks to him and nice to know Trimbach makes a lot of nice wines but that his wines with rs are much more to my liking than his dry wines that I had.