"Saturated ruby. Knockout primary nose combines black raspberry, espresso, brown spices, lavender, violet and bloody steak. Fully ripe yet lively, offering terrific floral cut to its intense flavors of dark fruits, licorice, rose petal and stony minerality. This wine boasts a rare balance of sweet fruit and minerality, not to mention great inner-mouth tension. Perhaps most impressive today on the spicy, unflagging finish, where the wine's serious, building tannins are wonderfully distributed. A splendid and long-lived Clos de la Roche in the making. "