La Grande Rue, Domaine Lamarche 2005

A hint of menthol adds nuance to the mostly highly-spiced red berry fruit nose that is quite reserved if beautifully complex while leading to sweet, delicious, generous and round medium full flavors that are classy and refined, all wrapped in a strikingly persistent and explosive finish. This offers excellent cellar potential and at this early stage the wood, which is normally fairly prominent, is already well integrated but note that this will need every bit of 15 years, perhaps even slightly longer, to arrive at its prime as it's very structured. A really beautiful LGR that showed even a bit better than it had only three weeks earlier as it was given the benefit of an hour's worth of air.