1979 Château Certan de May
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Tasting notes
It had been quite a number of years since I last had a bottle of the 1979 Certan de May, and I made up for it well in 2005 and 2006 with four or five opportunities to taste the wine. The 1979 Certan de May has not lost a step as it passed its twentieth-fifth birthday, and is clearly a candidate for wine of the vintage. The nose is deep and beautifully pure, offering up notes of red and black plums, a bit of black raspberries, chocolate, tobacco, delicate hints of game and summer truffle, woodsmoke, a whisper of spicy wood and crushed violets. On the palate the wine is full-bodied, deep and resolved, with a lovely core of black raspberry fruit, outstanding complexity, impeccable balance, tangy acidity, and a very long, polished and refined finish of excellent intensity. This is a beautiful bottle of claret at its absolute apogee, and though the reputation of the ’79 vintage is rather moderate, this is a great bottle of wine that would put to shame many châteaux in more fashionable vintages.
Critic scores
Jeff Leve, The Wine Cellar Insider
John Gilman, View From The Cellar
More reviews and scores
The palate displays Black fruit, Plums and Strawberries with a silky finish. This is also at its peak and will not improve.
Increasingly the 1979 Certan de May appears to be one of the top five or six wines of the vintage. It exhibits a deep, dark ruby, saturated color, and a blossoming yet still unevolved bouquet of black fruits, fruitcake, toasty new oak, and cedar. Full-bodied and massive, this broad-shouldered, expansively-flavored wine still has some tannin to lose. It will benefit from another 2-3 years of cellaring; it should keep through the first decade of the next century. Last tasted, 7/93.