This isn't so much a TN as a question. What happened to this strange wine? After spending four years in my far-too-warm cellar before I installed a Whisperkool in 1998, this initially overrated wine -- the Wine Spectator initially gave it a 95, then Suckling downgraded that to 91 eight years later -- rested at 58 degrees for the next ten years until yesterday evening when I decanted it for an hour, poured it back into the bottle and took it across town to a restaurant for dinner, where it proved almost dead on arrival, an over-the-hill near zero with nothing of note except an old wine's typical thick brick and white meniscus.
But somehow the remaining one-third or so of the bottle got carried back home and poured into a 375. This evening, about twenty hours later, for the heck of it I poured my wife and myself a glass. "Not bad," she said. "This can't be the same wine you poured last night." But it was: the same wine and not bad. Not great, not very good, but not bad. On the nose for the first time we found hints of cassis, mushrooms and cedar and on the palate a small bonus of blackfruits that hung on through the delicate finish. Not bad and a bit interesting. For points I'd give it, say, an 85.
This wasn't a young sleeper that woke up. This was an old boy on his last legs who perked up, apparently a contradiction of the conventional wisdom that an way-over-the-hill wine should never be decanted.