Musar Red, Chateau Musar 2001

The 2001 Château Musar has long had a reputation as one of the greatest recent vintages from this property, so I was delighted when Marc Hochar included it in the more youthful examples of the wine for me to taste in preparation for this article. At age fifteen the 2001 has now reached a lovely point in its evolution for current drinking, as it delivers a fine bouquet of raspberries, cherries, spices meats, a fine base of stony soil tones, cigar wrapper, a bit of pepper, garrigue and a touch of cedar. On the palate the wine is pure, full-bodied, complex and shows beautiful mid-palate depth, with impeccable balance, fine focus and grip, melting tannins and outstanding complexity on the long and utterly classic finish. I drank a fair bit of Château Musar from the decade of the 1970s in my formative years in the wine trade, and this 2001 reminds me very strongly of what the beautiful 1978 and 1979 drank like back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. This is a classic Musar! 2017-2055.