I last drank a bottle of the 1990 Haut-Bailly out of my cellar almost a decade ago, where the wine showed lovely promise, but was still several years away from blossoming, so I was very happy to have the excuse of this...
I last drank a bottle of the 1990 Haut-Bailly out of my cellar almost a decade ago, where the wine showed lovely promise, but was still several years away from blossoming, so I was very happy to have the excuse of this article to open another bottle and see how the passage of time has affected the wine. At age thirty, the wine has now entered its plateau of peak maturity and is drinking splendidly well, with the bouquet wafting from the glass in an absolutely classic combination of black cherries, Cuban cigars, a superb base of gravelly soil tones, hints of the chipotle pepper to come with further bottle age, gentle spice elements, tobacco leaf, a suave framing of new oak and a smoky topnote. On the palate the wine is deep, ripe, pure and full-bodied, with a very fine core of fruit, excellent soil signature, buried tannins that are just starting to melt away, excellent focus and grip and a long, complex and beautifully balanced finish. Though the 1990 Haut-Bailly is really beginning to drink well, there is most emphatically no hurry to consume this wine, which easily has another forty to fifty years of positive evolution ahead of it. Fine, fine juice.