Chateau de Beaucastel 1985

The 1985 Beaucastel is a wine that I drank quite a bit of in the first bloom of youth, and then, having finished my case up, have not seen with any great regularity in the last ten years. I have heard reports of folks that taste this vintage with more frequency that there can be some bottles that are rather heavily marked by brettanomyces, but this recent bottle was clean, pure and very promising, albeit still a few years away from reaching its apogee. The bouquet is lovely and quite classically middle-aged in its profile, with still some of the density of youth now beginning to morph into secondary layers of complexity in its mélange of dried black cherries, cassis, espresso, hung game, incipient notes of dried oak leaves, soil tones that are not yet transparent and a topnote of ground pepper. On the palate the wine is full-bodied, pure and very long in the mouth, with a fine core of fruit, still some ripe tannins to resolve, and excellent length and grip on the classy finish. I would suspect that the ’85 Beaucastel could use another few years to really blossom, and will reach its absolute apogee in eight to ten years.

Drink: now-2040