2004 Ch Malescot St-Exupery

The wines of Ch Malescot St-Exupery seldom feature in tastings, yet this estate is one of the first to be encountered as one negotiates the winding D2 road through the heart of the little town of Margaux. I’ve only had the 1995 a few years back (with Kieron and Daniel at Wild Rocket), which I remembered was huge and almost too tannic, hardly ready for drinking. However, with my experience that the 2004 wines of the Left Bank are drinking rather well now, I decided to try a bottle of the 2004 at Otto (with a couple of Residents) on 10 Nov 2010, its relatively inexpensive price of SGD100 being a further compeling impetus. I only had time to double-decant it for about 30 minutes at home before hurrying off to the restaurant, where Paolo and the chef were enthusiastically showing off the new arrival of white truffles from Alba.

The wine displayed a deep luxuriant shade of purple, quite open on the nose with notes of blueberries, fragrant roses in full bloom and a trace of vanilla, although in typical Margaux fashion, it was neither wildly exuberant nor powerful in any sense, firmly in the feminine camp on the quiet side. On the palate, the wine was gentle on the entry, medium-bodied and rounded with ripe cool berries, but a bit of hollowness on the mid-palate was quite evident, eventually replaced by a rich layer of salty minerality in the mid-body, not unlike a premier cru Burgundy, fleshing out with time without any oakiness. The overall impression was one of classicism, poise and elegance, drinking well as expected, a perfect accompaniment to the excellent cuisine of mushroom soup with foie gras, pasta, and wagyu beef, each topped with 2 grams of white truffles.